Untouchable
by Kount Xero
Summary: Ms. Marvel arrives at the Institute as a show of solidarity on the eve of the Registration Act being passed. Charles Xavier's ghosts come out to haunt Rogue and Scott, and force Rogue into a confrontation that will change everything - herself, the world and the X-Men. (M for a reason. Final part of the "Untouchable" series of fics.)
1. Prologue (The Stranger Remains)

" _ **Untouchable"**_

 _Author's Note: This is the latest installment in a series that has been going on, on and off again, for more than five years now. The reading order goes: Touch, The Rest of the World is Noise, Mouvement, The Dividing Line. The events that will take place shortly are payoffs of build-ups introduced in past installment(s), so, caveat emptor. The chapters and their related quotes are taken from Diary of Dreams songs, as the first installment was._

 _Warning: this one is a bit darker than the others, and has a sexuality theme running throughout, and has a few (non-explicit) sex scenes. Other warnings include cursing, violence and themes of self-abuse. You were warned._

 **Prologue**

 **(The Stranger Remains)**

 **(The stranger remains the same)**

The black limousine slowly cruising through the streets of Harlem was the safest place to be in New York, as its sole passenger knew, for tonight, nobody would be looking outside. It wasn't the cold of late February or the three-feet high snow that kept them in their homes, huddled around heaters, the passenger knew. It was the TV screens, it was CNN, it was Fox – they were all waiting to hear the first baying of the war hounds.

Her hands tightened on her cane. Even without eye sight, she could still sense the bile fascination that had emptied the streets. It made what she had to do a lot easier, not because of the flashy car or the eerie sensation she knew was emanating from it, but it could help her make her point.

Destiny kept her senses peeled, and suddenly, in the scattershot emotions and screaming thoughts echoing, there it was – focused, poised and waiting. The eyes of a cat, glowing in the headlights of the approaching car. Destiny's fingers went down to the arm rest and she lowered the window on the side of the cat. The cat lazily approached and gracefully leaped up into the limo. The tinted window rolled back up, whirring.

Destiny could feel the seat next to her shifting as the cat expanded. In her mind's eye, Destiny saw her: thick, sheepskin coat over a pure white shirt, three buttons open, revealing a smooth, blue skin and a skull necklace. Black, form-fitting jeans underneath, the belt holding it around a beautiful waist adorned with skulls. Combat boots, black.

Henna-hair and feline features. Fierce, yellow eyes that did not show the pupils.

"Hello, Mystique." Destiny said. She leaned forward and tapped on the window separating them from the driver. George took his cue and began to follow the route he had been given.

"What is it, Destiny? Did you have a vision?"

"I am fine as well, thank you for asking."

"You didn't call me here to socialize." Mystique scoffed.

"No. But it would be nice, don't you think?"

"...yes."

"See? That wasn't so hard."

"You're awfully playful tonight." Mystique said, crossing her arms, "What did you see? Is it Rogue?"

"She has a name now. She took it from her lifelong tormentor."

"That woman..." Mystique hissed in contempt, "I never thought I'd be able to do worse than her. I'm surprised she's still alive."

"Not for long." Destiny pursed her lips to hold back a smile. Much as she hated taking pleasure in the demise of someone, having seen the scars made by her, she had always waited for the day she'd see her disappear forever.

"So that's what you saw?" Mystique asked, "Rogue's aunt dying?"

"Among other things... listen to me, Mystique. What is about to take place is beyond your ability to stall, influence or stop. It's too late to do anything."

"Then why are you telling me now?"

"Because I didn't see it _until_ it was too late." Destiny said.

Mystique's brow furrowed. The car took a turn, gliding through the empty streets, surrounded by dead buildings teeming with the bitter taste of violent excitement.

"You?" Mystique asked, "You didn't _see it coming_?"

Destiny shook her head.

"I'm afraid whatever prevented me from seeing it, also revealed it to me for a reason. If I had to guess, I would say it either slipped, which is unlikely... or it doesn't care if I see, because I can't do anything about what's going to happen."

Destiny turned her head to face Mystique, and to Mystique, she was looking over her shoulder, at something behind her.

"Everything is about to change for mutantkind. It's not just the Senate vote, or what will follow... the metal Colossi in the skies, the police state setting its ever-watchful eyes on we the few. They will not blame her for it, thought she will look like the cause."

"...what will happen to Rogue?"

Destiny sighed.

"The same thing that happens to all of us when we lose ourselves." She said.


	2. Element 1: Zeitgeist

" _ **Untouchable"**_

 **Chapter One  
"Element 1: Zeitgeist"**

 **(Ich wurde mit eninem Namen geboren)**

Her long, blonde hair was kept somewhat in check by the grey, stylish wool beanie that put up a brave front against the wind. Her make-up was impeccable. The wind constantly changing direction prompted her to remove stray strands of hair from her mouth as she spoke into the microphone. Her bright red knitted scarf went perfectly with her double-breasted, light grey overcoat, and it matched the faded red of her lip gloss.

" _We're here in Westchester, just outside the front gates of the controversial Xavier Institute. We're waiting for the arrival of Carol Danvers, call sign Ms. Marvel - a former Air Force 2_ _nd_ _Lieutenant who was dishonorably discharged two weeks ago when she was ousted as a mutant."_

A crowd of protesters were fading in and out of the frame as other cameras panned around to show the police barricade holding them back. Picket signs reading familiar variations on tired themes like **SEND THEM TO THE MOON** , **GOD HATES MUTIES, NO MUTANTS IN OUR SCHOOLS** and so on were jittering as incoherent slogans of hate formed the background noise.

" _The Xavier Institute, founded by the renowned professor Charles Xavier as a private school for the gifted, recently came under scrutiny after a member of their student body lost control of her powers and almost destroyed the Academy of Tomorrow."_

Montage of Rouge's power surge in the middle of the campus followed. Scott felt her gloved hand grip his a little tighter as they watched her demolish the Hellions.

" _Some say that Ms. Danvers' appearance today is a PR move, a show of mutant solidarity on the day that the United States Senate will be voting on Senator Richard Kelly's Mutant Registration Act, which will make it mandatory for every mutant in the U.S. to register themselves as mutants, and to present themselves for screening procedures to determine whether their powers are safe for the public at large. The motion to end debate came mere hours after the bill was opened to the Senate floor, making it one of the fastest proposals to move to a final vote in the history of the United States."_

A second montage, this time of the various recorded exploits of the X-Men offered a variety of mutant gifts to the viewers: optic blast, superhuman strength, adamantium claws (Logan rolled his eyes – they always thought _that_ was his gift), flight, weather manipulation, teleportation, mastery of magnetism, Sooraya Qadir's attempt to flay Rogue alive...

The cameras cut to a black Lincoln that pulled up just outside of the media freakshow.

" _There she is now, we're going to see if we can get a statement."_

The side door opened and out stepped Carol Danvers. She was wearing a three-piece suit, navy blue with white pinstripes, under a double-breasted, melton wool greatcoat with empty epaulets. She had a white scarf around her neck, and what seemed to be white, polished brogues instead of boots. Her blonde hair was impeccable, her blue eyes sharp and her gentle smile all the more alluring as the reporters flocked to her like a group of locusts.

She thanked the driver, closed the door and began to make her way through the gauntlet of cameras and microphones pointed directly at her. Every single person near her was asking a different question, only half of any got through, and the crowd in the background were shouting " _traitor, traitor_."

The anchor woman for CNN was asking the only audible question.

" _Ms. Danvers, how do you think the Senate will vote? Do you think your being here will affect the outcome?"_

Carol seemed to consider it.

" _No."_ she said, _"They've already made up their mind to prosecute us."_

" _When you say 'us'-"_

" _When I say 'us', I mean mutants. We're not who we are, or_ what _we are as you want me to put it, by choice. Now, if you'll excuse me..."_

The front gates parted, ever-so-slightly groaning as they did, prompting the cameras to point there. Charles Xavier, wearing an impeccable, black, three-piece suit extended a hand to Carol in greeting. Wolverine, having chosen to wear nothing but his usual combo of jeans, undershirt and a plaid shirt, was right behind him – in an unfamiliar gesture, as the doors closed behind them, he pushed Charles' chair.

* * *

The entire student body of the Xavier Institute was crammed into the common room, some able to secure a seat, others standing or sitting on the floor. Huddled together, all unsure of what the next few hours would bring; calculating doomsday scenarios and trying to estimate if their gifts would be enough to save them in the end. Others, like Jean and Sean in the adjacent couch, were holding onto one another, arm-in-arm and hand-in-hand. Tabitha was twirling strands of Amara's hair, talking her ear off about why she should've worn a dress that morning.

One figure in the crowd stood out. Drowning in his large hoodie, invisible behind the hood, hands gloved in PVC latex, Kevin Ford just wanted to not be somewhere with a lot of people in it. Not that anyone in the room was stupid enough to get anywhere near him or anything... the mansion kids were nice like that. They barely acknowledged that he was even there, but every once in a while, Kevin caught little glances, away from the TV and in his direction, and sometimes saw them wanting to say something.

He knew that nobody would.

"She'z almost at the door!" Kurt announced, eyes wide open and glued to the screen.

"Kurt, she's coming here." Scott said.

"I knov! It's all so surreal, izn't it?" Kurt said with a half-giggle.

Kitty, pulling at the hem pink button-up poplin she had on, convinced that it was the wrong choice for the occasion, rolled her eyes.

"Glad somebody's happy." She said.

"Or a wreck." Lance intoned, feeling like the tie Kitty had made him wear was a noose ready to be pulled up.

"Maybe we oughtta get up, give the girl a good look at what we're about!" Tabitha said. She formed a very small explosion at the tip of her index finger, "Tick tick tick..."

"Stop it." Amara said, smiling.

"Make me." Tabitha grinned.

"Later." Amara winked.

Rogue rolled her eyes.

"Ah swear, mansion with this many rooms, they still can't get none." She said.

"Ach, 'tis love." Sean said, watching Kurt's tail move, "Wha' can ye dae?"

"Everyone!" Ororo's voice stopped them short. She stood at the doorway, in uniform, hands on her hips, "Our guest has arrived and is in the foyer. Perhaps you should be good hosts and greet her. And Kevin, this means you as well."

Kevin flinched. Rogue caught it.

* * *

Carol admitted that she was impressed. She had heard of the Xavier Institute, and had seen the public face, but being brought inside the place, right after the media blitz was somewhat surreal to her. This was made somewhat more difficult by Logan's unnerving presence. It wasn't so much what he was as it was how he was – Carol had seen his type in basic, during missions, even on the ground. There was something animal-like behind the already-rough exterior, pure primal instinct... and the way he was wearing down a Cuban cigar wasn't helping.

Having noticed that he had been staring at her for a while, Carol was about to ask what he wanted when Charles Xavier's calming voice stopped her short.

"Ah, there we are. Carol, I'd like you to meet my students."

Carol's heart sank. She hadn't been expecting an army, of course. She had seen the footage, she had seen that despite how well they had been trained, they weren't anywhere near the level of actual soldiers. But this wasn't what she had been expecting at all: she only saw a group of adequately dressed teens with their curious eyes turned towards her. She only saw casualties in the upcoming war.

Nevertheless, Ms. Marvel swallowed her thoughts and waved a hello in their general direction, smiling gently. Some returned it. A few even said it out loud. Some looked away.

"Welcome to our home." Charles said, "Would any of you like to introduce yourselves?" he glanced at those assembled. No takers.

"Hello, everyone." Carol said, "I'm Carol, though I think you know me better by my call sign, Ms. Marvel. I'm a patriot, and a mutant, if you can believe that. I was an Air Force pilot, but now, I'm both a threat to America and a dishonored soldier. Sort of like you... except you're too young to recruit. Or maybe I'm too old."

Nervous laughter. Worked it every time.

"So that's me. How about you?"

One stepped forward. Carol's eyes immediately went to the ruby quartz glasses, gleaming red not from an outside source, but from within. He held out his hand. Carol, careful not to crush it, took it and they shook.

"Scott Summers," he said, "Better known by my call sign, Cyclops. Welcome to the Xavier Institute, Ms. Marvel."

After an endless row of introductions, pleasant exchanges and the inevitable telling of a few brief anecdotes, Charles gently pushed his students back and asked her if there was anything they could do.

"Are you thirsty, for starters?"

"Actually, I'd very much like to meet Dr. McCoy, if you don't mind." Carol said, "I don't see him here, and there is something I would like to ask him about. It's urgent."

"He's probably down at the lab." Jean said, "I can take you, if you'd like."

Carol smiled.

"I'd be delighted." She said, "And you are?"

Jean stepped forward and held out her hand. Carol took it.

"Jean Grey, Ms. Danvers."

"Call me Carol. Or Ms. Marvel, if you like."

"Ms. Marvel. Right this way."

* * *

" _Observation. Subject 26: Kevin Ford. Codename: Wither. Gift: dissolving organic matter by skin contact. A working theory is that his skin constantly secretes an equivalent of the piranha solution, which is usually a mixture of surfiric acid and hydrogen peroxide. He's been unwilling to test this on partially organic materials. As with cases 1 through 25, the X-Gene marker is in the 23_ _rd_ _chromosome. Kevin's parents are deceased - no addition is to be made to the carrier parent list - another trait he shares with Anna Marie. So far, research shows that the father may be the one who carries and passes on the X-Gene, but with very limited access to parents, I can't be sure that the father carries an actual X-Gene himself. I have a dependent hypothesis, which states that if so, the father's X-Gene can manifest. Either way, further data is required to-"_

The lab doors hissed open, the heavy superalloy making a rolling sound as they slid, tearing Hank's attention away from the microscope. He set his small mp3 recorder down on the desk and stretched, hands pressing into his back.

He took off his glasses as Jean led in whom he recognized to be Carol Danvers. It took him a further second to remember that she was supposed to be coming to the mansion, because, he recalled after the third second, the Senate would take a vote today.

He glanced at the grandfather clock on the corner. 11:23. More than eight hours since he had started sifting through the latter half of the blood samples.

"Dr. McCoy," Carol stepped forward, hand held out. He took it, careful not to squeeze too hard, "It's a genuine pleasure."

"All mine, Ms. Marvel." Hank said with a gentle smile. He reached behind him and pulled up one of the spare stools. The doors closed as she sat down. She took off her coat, neatly folded it and laid it across her lap. "My apologies for not being up there, I simply lost track of time."

"I know how it is." She said, with what he identified to be a manufactured West Virginian accent. Too wide to be real.

"Well, welcome to my home within a home." He said.

"What are you working on?"

"I'm trying to identify some key aspects of the X-Gene."

"So far?"

"Too preliminary to say."

"But you _can_ identify an X-Gene carrier?" Carol asked.

"If I have a DNA sample, preferably blood, yes, I can, absolutely."

"How long does it take?"

"Depends on how good the sample is, but not more than few hours." Hank said, "Provided that I am not interrupted."

"I was hoping you'd say that."

Carol dug into the folds of her coat and retrieved an unmarked vial filled with blood. Hank raised an eyebrow.

"...yours?" he asked.

Carol nodded.

"I need you to test it." She said, "But I need you to keep the results between us. Would you agree to that?"

"All due respect, Ms, but f you think you may be carrying something dangerous, like a currently unknown pathogen, I-"

"No, nothing like that. The CDC already went over my samples with everything they had. I'm clean."

"Then, I would like to know why."

Carol's face darkened.

"Do you know why I was ousted?"

"No."

"They discovered something in my bloodwork, my Chem 9. They tested me a few times while I was on my period, a few times after intensive training. At one point, I was forbidden from consuming anything with processed sugar in it. It turns out that my metabolism was too stable. The results were identical no matter what condition I was in. They told me later that they had been mixing certain hormones into the food I was served in the canteen, trying to see if they could induce a shift anywhere. They tried to drop my sodium levels below, if you could believe that."

Hank clenched his teeth and held back the colorful language he desperately wanted to employ.

"But they couldn't find any genetic abnormalities." Carol said, "That's why I want you to test it."

Hank took the vial and observed it.

"The X-Gene _can_ be difficult to find, if one does not know where to look. I highly doubt they've gone in deep enough. Very well. I'll let you know this evening."

"Thank you." Carol said, "And please, whatever the result... don't tell the others."

"You have my word."

* * *

She had seen him coming. She was sitting on the stairs, one step down from the top, and she watched him get up to where she was. He sat down next to her, his arm snaking around her waist as he settled, making her feel warmer inside. She leaned against him, shifting to settle into him, to click into place once again. For a moment, a split second before he kissed the top of her head and let her see his thoughts, all was right with the world.

Just for a moment.

"Ah couldn't take it." Rogue said, "Sorry."

He held her a little tighter.

"Too many _yea_ s, too few _nay_ s." He said.

She didn't have to ask. She had been there for a good long while, just staring at the wall, wondering what they were going to do while he, his memory told him, was counting the remaining senators, how many it would take to bury the bill, watching the count with equal parts fear and anger.

What he gave to her with the briefest of contacts told her that he, too, couldn't stomach it anymore.

"Tell me we'll be alright?" Rogue pleaded, looking at the wall, "Lie to me?"

"We'll be alright, Anna Marie." He said, his fingers drawing lazy circles on her hip. She couldn't help but smile. She liked it when he said her name. Made it feel more real, made the sound of it a bit easier on her ears, to the point where she hoped that one day, she'd get used to her name too.

"You're a shit liar." She said. It was his turn to flash a strained smile.

"Hey, you asked."

"Ah know." Rogue sighed, "Just like how Ah know you're here because we lost. It passed."

"Five minutes, give or take."

"Five more minutes then." She sighed, "Ah wanna enjoy this for five more minutes."

Rogue squirmed for a few seconds, tried to get closer to him. Fabric, nothing more, but as he accommodated her, as he pulled her in and held her tightly, she felt that it might as well have been the whole world between them. Clinging to one another in hopes that they could float that way, be shielded from the storm, Rogue knew that they were just trying to prolong the end. They weren't afloat on the ocean, they were cornered.

"Oh _fuck_ you!" Tabitha's frustrated voice cracked like a whip, " _Up yours,_ you mutant-hating, inbred, whorehouse byproduct mother _fuckers! Up fucking yours!_ "

Rogue closed her eyes and tried to keep her hands from shaking.

* * *

Speech was implicitly banned after the TV was turned off. Kurt's cell phone announced a call from Amanda, which he decided to take to some far end of the mansion, and teleported without a second thought. Everyone else shuffled off, either to their rooms, or simply around, both equally aimlessly and in anticipation of what they thought was inevitably going to come. Some issued dares and challenges, some tried to put together why this couldn't be real, some played the cynic and some, like Bobby Drake, decided to bury it all beneath something desperately enjoyable.

The common room was empty in no time at all, leaving Ororo, Charles and Carol.

Ororo glanced at Charles, who was sitting motionless in his wheelchair. His face gave nothing away, and had it not been for the almost invisible flexing of his jaw, she would not have thought him as furious as he actually was. Carol, feeling like the bearer of bad news, couldn't speak to tell him that she knew what it was like to see what you've idealized fall to pieces.

But being only a guest, a latecomer to a struggle that was and had been his life, she stayed her tongue, and contented herself with the faint hope that the President she had voted for would not let it stand.

* * *

Two levels below, in his lab, Hank glanced at the clock and remembered a particular one: the Doomsday clock of the Cold War years. He didn't need a television, a radio, a podcast, anything at all to know the end result. His knowledge of history had told him the result of the vote before the Senate debate had started. Prejudice, to him, was the human condition as much as anything else was – the struggle of the self to deal with the reality the other, much more id-driven than-

The DNA spectrometer emitted a thin, faint bleep, and the rustling sound of the analysis being printed followed. Hank leapt up and grabbed one of the bars overhead. He made his way across the lab and to the machine. He flipped himself upside down, feet grabbing hold of the bar, and reached down to pull the read-out from the printer shelf. He turned it upside down, or right side up from his perspective, and began to scan the page.

"Hmm..." one finger thoughtfully caressed his chin, "Now, isn't this _fascinating?_ "

* * *

Rogue slowly slipped into consciousness, leaving behind the uneasy no-dream that she had still not gotten used to. The first thing she saw was the bedside clock. 3:34, in green. She could feel what her body was doing, and it was preparing to get her to move, as it had woken up already. Rogue sighed. One of _those_ nights. Beside her, Scott was sleeping soundly, one arm flung over her stomach as always. Rogue found that their ankles had gotten tangled up. She felt that she was glad both for the skin-suit, and the made-to-order pajamas, emerald green, that had come with a hood. Still, she could feel his breath through the fabric, warming up a spot on the back of her neck. She shivered. It was a delightful sensation, to have him this close, but her delight died quick, leaving to the reality that she couldn't feel it without something in between to dull it down.

Rogue gently detached herself from Scott's touch, lifting his arm with gloved hands, and got up. She felt the off-white carpeting under her bare soles, despite the skin-suit. It wasn't very thick, she could barely feel it there at any time. It let air in as if it wasn't even present, but prevented anything else, and was, as Dr. McCoy had proven, durable, so she wouldn't have to worry about ripping it when taking it off.

Of course, it ended where her neck began, and at the wrists, as she had to use her power for come-what-may.

 _And what's that? More Sentinels? People coming to take us away? "And when they come for me, I'll be gone."_

Rogue clenched her teeth.

 _I am not going to some prison. They're not gonna take everything I have away from me._

One thing that had kept her company throughout her excursion to Mississippi was the talk on everybody's mouths – the proposed Mutant Registration Act. Rogue couldn't help but shirk a little from it, as she knew her exploits at the Academy of Tomorrow had helped speed it along. Every gas station TV, every set in every dive, even her aunt's radio had been regurgitating a steady wall of noise, politicobabble mixed with responses to Magneto's inevitable, and this time much encouraged, speechifying about "homo superior."

With her night-time worries settled, Rogue quietly snuck out of the room and made her way down the hall. There was one place to go at this time of night – the kitchen.

She wondered if Kevin was there again.

* * *

Rogue walked through the house of silence, her footfalls sounding like the Juggernaut's stomping to her ears. Despite everything, at night, the Mansion was dead quiet. Only the sound of steady breathing, and the occasional one of irregular breathing, covered the empty space.

The sounds of home.

This was home now, had been for some time, but at times like these, with half-dimmed lights forming semi-reflective circles, dim little suns on the doors, and the intake of breath was so low it was almost inaudible, it felt like a graveyard to Rogue.

And those that did make their breathing known, well. Those were just moonlighting in a cemetery.

Rogue thought about going to the common area, maybe watch some TV, maybe pop one of those Ed Wood DVDs she'd been trying to find the environment to watch. Something urged her not to. It'd be empty, she could do anything she wanted, but it seemed too dark. The screen would be a vengeful eye, spread far and wide, watching the soon-to-be-victims.

In that moment, the mansion felt like a trap.

The only safe place, she felt, was the kitchen.

* * *

Rogue opened the door and headed straight for the fridge. She took out milk and fished the cabinets, as silently as she could, for something to snack on. A tapping drew her attention. She turned around to see Kevin, sitting at the table behind her, pointing at the Chunky Chips Ahoy he had opened – a valuable commodity in the mansion. Silently, Rogue offered him some milk. He shook his head.

Rogue sat down across the table from him. She knew that he wouldn't want her to be near him, even if he wanted her to be near him.

"We can whisper." He said, reminding her of the courtesy they paid for the advanced-senses crowd. He held out the blue box, "Cookie?"

"Thanks, sugah." Rogue said, taking three, just in case. She dipped one in milk, "Can't sleep?"

"I don't sleep at night."

"At all?"

"No... I-I mean I s-sleep, but... but during the d-day. M-m-mostly."

Rogue took the interim of munching on her cookie to consider it. Then, she nodded. Of course. _People_ slept at night, which meant they wouldn't be around.

"I-I don't know how... I-I mean, Mr. L-Logan doesn't sleep."

"He does." Rogue said, "Once in a blue moon, Ah think."

Kevin chuckled, but immediately cupped his hands over his mouth. The look in his eyes made the milk in Rogue's mouth go sour. She knew the look. She had seen it before, in her reflection in Scott's glasses when she had said something that she wished she hadn't... to which he had always smiled and hugged her instead of saying anything as bad as she always feared he would.

Voicing her own opinion, not influenced, guided or stifled by someone else's had been as alien to her in those moments as Kevin's own laughter had been to him just then.

 _...what would Scott say?_

"Don't be like that."

Kevin shrunk where he sat. Rogue cursed at herself. Of course she didn't know how to do this. Without the others, without their expertise, she was just as lost as him.

"Ya laughed. Why's that so bad?"

Kevin hesitated.

"C'mon, sugah." Rogue pressed, "One untouchable to 'nother?"

"I don't h-hear it much. It's weird."

"No, it ain't. 'think it was lovely."

"M-Miss Rogue..."

"Anna."

"Wh-what..?"

"Anna Marie." Rogue sighed, "Y'know, it's still strange comin out of mah mouth. Like it ain't real."

"Why do they..."

"...call me Rogue?"

Kevin nodded.

"Childhood nickname. The only thing Ah remembered when Ah forgot everythin else."

"The Professor said... y-your power, it... almost killed you."

A flash of memories, condensed into a split second. Running the Hellions to the ground. Rogue nodded.

"I wish mine could."

Rogue raised an eyebrow.

"Could what, sugah?"

"Kill me."

Rogue felt the chair underneath her. It was the epitome of discomfort, wrong angles and sharp curves all bound together by nails, sharp nails that she could almost feel inside the wood. Her back was starting to cramp up. She wasn't sure eating this many cookies, which she had absent-mindedly just took down, was a good idea at night. Discomfort emanated from her in waves.

Something inside of her wasn't sure if it should cry or scream or do both for good measure.

The kitchen door was almost slammed open, caught at the very last second by thick, hairy fingers. Rogue jumped nevertheless, and Kevin was simply frozen.

"Shit."

The gruff, throaty voice was accompanied by the burly presence of Logan, which was enough to give Kevin an excuse to shrink even further where he sat. Logan went to the fridge, fished out a beer, flicked the cap off and drank it down. He took a second one out.

"Rogue." He grumbled between sips, "Can't sleep?"

Rogue shook her head. Kevin was still as a statue.

"Woke up and came down here, right?"

"Yeah?"

"Didn't think t'watch TV or somethin'?"

"What'm Ah gonna watch anyway?"

"Thought so. Kid?" Logan said, half-turning his head to Kevin, "Get the fuck lost."

Kevin bolted. Logan came over and took the seat next to Rogue's, causing her to move away a little bit.

"So," Logan took a sip, "I'm chasin' this sound, 'xcept it's not a sound, it's a smell. It's a feelin', some kinda sense fuckin' with mine. Y'know what it reminds me of? The night ya opened the closet and found the old man's skeletons."

Rogue felt like she had just been doused with ice-cold water.

"Question is, why're ya here?"

"It just... felt safer."

" _Exactly._ "

Logan downed most of his beer.

"This is the only room where that thing, whatever the fuck it is, ain't around. That's why I'm here. It's happenin' again."

Rogue cradled her head in her hands. She felt like reaching for the strands and tearing them out. There was a cacophony in her head, and this time, she knew, it was her own thoughts, going out of control. Her heart was pounding. The skin-suit was allowing cold sweat to pour out of every pore.

Something cold made her jump. She looked to see a bottle Blue Labatt, with only a few sips left in it.

"Drink up, Stripe." Logan said, "Ya look like you could use it right about now."

Rogue knocked it back without question. It tasted bitter.

"Now let's go." He said, "We gotta wake up Charles."


	3. Malice

" _ **Untouchable"**_

 **Chapter Two  
** **"Malice"**

 **(Choose your weapon and go to war instead)**

Logan led the way, back upstairs, to the end of the hall, right, up another flight and then to the French doors of Charles' room.

He knocked. No answer. He knocked a little more forcefully. Nothing. He sniffed the air, trying to catch his scent. It was there, all over the room, but faint and slightly indistinct. An after-aroma.

"He ain't here." He said, "This late..."

Something began to bleep and whirr. Logan's hand went to the waistband of his boxers and retrieved the earpiece of his com-link. He put it on and clicked it.

"Yeah?"

" _I thought you might be awake."_

"Hank?"

" _I thought you should know: Charles is in the Danger Room."_

"The fuck is he doin' _there_?"

" _According to the log, he entered roughly forty minutes ago. Presently, he's in the exact center. He's been... well, looks like he's been staring at the wall."_

"Staring at the-" a thought prompted him, "Did he turn on the psi-shields?"

" _Let me check."_

"Why?" Rogue asked.

"If he did, it means he just wants some peace and quiet. He does that sometimes."

" _He didn't."_

"Shit." Logan hissed, "Alright, we're comin' down. Let me know if anything changes." He closed the channel, "Alright, Stripe – get Slim and Jean. Ten minutes. Got it?"

Rogue nodded.

"Go."

* * *

Scott was in the middle of a rather pleasant dream about a world war, in which he was a soldier, facing off against tin can robots that were easily dispatched, but were too many in number.. just too many. He knew he was giving ground, even as he tore his visor off his face and gave it to 'em raw, that there was just not enough in him to fend them off.

"...sugah, wake up."

Scott opened his eyes, only to squeeze them shut after the fraction of a second. His hand went to the night stand to grope around, trying to find his glasses as his senses tried to tell him that he was drenched in cold sweat.

"Ya have your goggles on."

One hand went to his head. There it was, the firm, elastic band of his ruby quartz goggles. He opened his eyes to the sight of Rogue leaning over him. Her hair was a slightly organized mess, stray strands frizzed up, which filled him with the urge to smooth it over.

Her expression stopped him short.

"What's happening?" he asked. He closed his eyes and took off his goggles. He was reaching for the night stand when he felt the frames of his glasses slide into place. She put his glasses on, and he didn't mind it when it was her.

"Trouble, sugah. C'mon, get up. Ah'll tell ya on the way."

* * *

Jean was shaking off the last vestiges of her otherwise peaceful sleep when Rogue and Scott opened the door to her room, as quietly as they could. Rogue kept Scott back, and once she was certain Jean could see her, pointed at her temple. She felt Jean's silvery touch, silky sweet, slide across her mind and collect the memory of the past twenty minutes. Once she was up to speed, Jean stood up and put on her black sweatpants. She slipped her feet into her flip flops and followed Rogue and Scott out the door.

Sean, still asleep, didn't even stir as they made their way down the hall.

* * *

"'s been eleven minutes, people." Logan said, standing in front of the entrance of the Danger Room. There was a small display above the door, which now read, in bright green letters, **SESSION IN PROGRESS.** "I said ten. Your timing's way off."

Jean wished she had actually put some shoes on. It wasn't the time to feel underdressed, she knew, but underdressed meant unprepared, which meant more to her in that moment. By contrast, Rogue was wearing pajamas, a hoodie and combat boots, Scott had pulled on his usual training outfit and Logan, the most disconcerting of all, was in his uniform.

Jean scratched her head.

"Why are we here?" she asked.

"Chuck's in there." Logan said, cocking his head towards the door, "He's been there for the past hour or so."

"What's he doing?" Scott asked.

"Nothin'. That's what concerns me. I ain't got the luxury of assumin' the best, so I'm prepared for the worst. Jean, yer our telepath. I'm on point. Cyclops, yer our resident diplomat. Last, Rogue, you-"

"...Ah'm gonna drain him if shit goes sideways."

"Well, that, and you can replace any of us. If somethin' happens."

"If it's got you this riled up," Jean said, "You're expecting it."

"Let's prove me wrong."

* * *

The interior of the Danger Room felt cold. The open space was kept at room temperature when idle, but the sleek, superalloy floor and walls left very little to give it the appearance of anything but a ghostly, empty space. Some of the square panels that made the walls were protruding out in different amounts, hiding behind them the automated systems they used to train. The walls curved as they went up, forming a dome overhead. There was armored glass lining the dome, a 360 observation deck, and right across from the entrance, high up, was the control room, the lights of which were currently on and highlighting the blue, furry form of Hank McCoy at the console.

In the center of the room, with his back turned to the entrance, was Charles Xavier's wheelchair. From what they could see, he had his morning gown on, and was currently staring, as it had been said, at the wall.

"Standard formation." Logan said.

Rogue flexed her fingers, and tried to suppress the nausea brought on by the prospect of touching someone. Logan and Scott took the lead. Logan went right, Scott left. They circled around the Professor. Jean hung back, recounting Jack Kerouac's staring contest with Hozomeen, the mountain, to sharpen her focus and to keep it idle.

Standing in front of Charles, Scott and Logan both saw that his face was blank, his expression slack. Logan shuddered. He had seen catatonics that looked that way, coma patients that always had their eyes open. He cleared his throat.

"Uhh... Charles?"

No response.

"Professor?" Scott tried, "Professor, can you hear me?"

Charles' eyes shot up and found Scott's, right on the dot. Charles flashed a crooked smile, teeth baring themselves through the slit that was his mouth – full of mischief, and if he could admit it to himself, sick pleasure.

"What took you so long?" Charles asked, his voice sharp, more nasal, lacking its usual depth, his British accent thinner, "If this is your best response time, I think I have chosen rather poorly... or he has, at any rate."

"And who the fuck are you?" Logan asked, his hands curling into fists by his side, "'cause you sure as shit ain't Charles having a conniption."

"Oh I am sure there's no need for introductions." Charles chuckled, "Besides, you have more immediate concerns."

"Such as?" Scott crossed his arms and cradled his chin to get his hands closer to his glasses without making it too obvious.

Charles grinned.

"Those glasses aren't made of ruby quartz." He said.

* * *

Scott turned away from Charles as quick as he could, turned the wrong way a split second before his eyes started to burn up. The optic blast shattered the lenses into small pieces and tore right into Wolverine, who, despite keeping his footing, responded with a scream. Rogue watched as the raw energy of the boy who had the sun in his eyes flayed the skin off of Logan's bones, gradually exposing metal. Scott closed his eyes, screaming. His hands rose, palms pressed onto his head, and he stumbled back, trying to find his bearings. Wolverine slumped over, his right arm and side reduced to strips of meat hanging from his gleaming, adamantium skeleton. He grabbed hold of his bones, in desperate attempt to keep them in place as he healed. He bit into his own arm, canines drawing blood, to keep from screaming.

Jean sprung into action threw a fist, using the movement to accentuate her telekinetic blast – a torrent of pure psi energy. It didn't affect Charles in the slightest, but he responded with a point of his finger. Jean felt the ground vanish from underneath her as she was sent flying. She let out a strangled yelp before hitting the wall with enough force that she felt her teeth rattling in her skull. She began to fall, but before she was even halfway, she felt herself being pulled back up and slammed into the wall again.

Rogue dashed towards the Professor, hand reaching out, fingers outstretched, grasping for that bald head. A hair's breadth away from his scalp, something tripped her and she flew in an arc and above the Professor, catching a flash of his mocking smile before falling down hard. She rolled and hit the wall with a grunt.

A small piece of one of the wall panels tore itself free. Floating in the air, it split into two pieces. One shot towards Jean, who managed to deflect it with a burst of telekinetic energy. The other found Rogue as she was standing up and buried itself right into her thigh, down to the bone. She screamed in pain as her leg gave in and she went down on one knee – the muscles contracted around the jagged shard, holding it in place.

"Rogue!" Scott shouted, "What's happening!? Logan!? Jean!? What the fuck is going on!?"

"You sonovabitch..." Logan said, standing up. His arm was mostly healed, as was his side, now showing his musculature instead of skin. He unsheathed his claws regardless.

"Tut tut tut." Charles clacked his tongue, "Language. Don't make me render you speechless."

"Who the _fuck_ are you!?"

Rogue pulled the sleeve of her hoodie around her hand and gripped the shard of metal tightly. Across the room, Jean was on her feet, circling, dancing with the floating shard, her hands outstretched to visualize what she was trying to do – only, Rogue saw that the shard was going to find her if this went on for much longer.

"Listen good, bub...dunno what you've done with the prof, but these claws o' mine will be ripping into you, sooner or later... prof or no prof in body."

Her fingers wrapped firmly around the metal. One, two-

"I don't think so." Charles said.

Rogue pulled it out, feeling every millimeter it scraped off of her flesh on its way, and screaming as she did so – she masked the sound of the shard Jean was grappling with getting stuck in the wall. Blood came rushing out of Rogue's wound. She unzipped her hoodie and took her t-shirt off – part of her was inappropriately aware of the fact that she had nothing underneath, as the sudden drop in temperature made her shiver, but there was no time to feel it properly. She slipped her hoodie back on and tied the t-shirt around her leg, tight enough to help, enough to keep her moving.

"That's enough!" Jean called.

A cold sensation swept across the room. Rogue tried to stand. Her knees were weak, she was losing too much blood all at once. Logan took two steps towards her.

"Stripe, how bad is it?" he said, eyeing the professor.

"Ah can handle it!" Rogue snarled through clenched teeth. She put her back to the wall and put her weight on her good leg to stand. Her eyes searched for Scott. He was to her left, back to the wall and hands on his eyes, listening, trying to work out where everyone was – the acoustics of the room was making it difficult to echo-locate.

"What's wrong?" Logan asked Charles, "Stomach flu?"

He glanced at Jean. One of her hands was pointed at Charles, the fingers of the other touching her temple. Her eyes were closed.

"Ungh!" Charles grunted, "Well, Little Red has some fight in her... after all... but feedback... can be... _dangerous._ "

A guttural scream tore its way out of Rogue's throat as the wound in her leg started to burn into itself, inflaming every single nerve ending in her body. The pain raised her awareness to new highs; she fell, and as she did, she began to feel her fingernails in their beds, her teeth in her gums, her eyes in their sockets, her ribs, her heart beating in the cavity built into her lung...

...somewhere, Jean was screaming as the shrill, razor-sharp psi-feedback sliced into her mind, bringing her back to every dentist appointment, this time without the novacaine, without the anesthesia... the scalpel tearing into that little patch of flesh covering a wisdom tooth...

...Logan crawled towards Rogue. It was harder now to move, or even think, even with the way pain registered in him – fainter, less distinct and less crippling, but in that moment, his healing factor was split down the middle. His veins were exploding, his heart tearing itself apart with every supercharged pump, and he was hemorrhaging through his nose and tear ducts... every time the damage was repaired in between beats at 134 BPM, it allowed the adamantium to poison his bone marrow. Heart on the beat, bones on the off.

 _Ah, deal it with it, you bastard. Get to her. Heal her. She'll fuck him up good._

Scott was frozen in place. All sensation of anything being around him had just been removed as his sense of touch was dulled. The ground wasn't under him. The wall wasn't behind him. There was nothing but an ocean of nothing, pitch-black void around him. In his mind, he was back in the orphanage after having blasted the south wing wall off, hugging the corner because he could only confirm the corner to exist, nothing else.

Rogue felt a hand pawing at her clothes. Barely conscious, barely able to see, she looked down. Logan's hand, a hairy hand, either right beside her or a million miles away, surreal.

"Stripe..." Logan managed, " _Heal._ "

Rogue reached down and touched him without a second thought.

* * *

 _It was World War One, or at least that was what they would be calling it. There'd be another, he knew. Then again, to him, it was just another day._

 _A Wednesday, maybe._

 _He was in Ypres, rifle in hand, bayonet already dulled with blood. His claws had already broken off and healed back twice. He was hugging a barrier of sandbags, tying to see where the enemy was at... he wasn't exactly sure who the enemy was anymore. Fifteen minutes ago, he had had a Union Flag on his arm, which was removed by some asshole with a bayonet getting lucky in the blind panic. He supposed that he was on the other side of something, but battle lines changed so fast that he wasn't sure in whose territory he was – just that he was in Belgium._

 _Well, at least it still beat a week in Alsace-Lorraine._

 _There wasn't any time to figure it out either – all he knew was that his hands were caked in blood, the rifle was just a decoration, and he was sharing the trench with a German boy. Skeleton of a boy, shorter than him. His jaw was flapping to the rhythm of his nerves – he was going on about how he just wanted to be an artist in between explosions. Logan didn't think he was going to make it home, especially since he was about to get a dull bayonet to the throat if he didn't shut the fuck up about it soon._

* * *

Logan clenched his teeth as the pain began to set in, as his healing factor gave up on his bones to keep his heart beating. In the background of his awareness, Jean collapsed, exhausted from the psycho-somatic agony and finally –mercifully- fell unconscious.

* * *

 _The children were still alive. That was what mattered in that moment, that the children were still alive. Logan was standing cold beside as they flocked to the Cap, who didn't speak a word of German, but managed to pull them in with that winning smile of his. They were thanking him, asking him if he was an angel, if he had anything to eat, if he knew where their parents were._

 _The Cap didn't know that last one. Logan did. The stench of their remains was still in his nostrils, and he knew that he would never forget that smell. He would carry the memory of it with him forever._

 _A hand pulled on his uniform's pants. Logan looked down to see a boy. Brilliant blue eyes, messy, jet-black hair. The arm that was pulling at his uniform branded with the tattoo he was sick of seeing._

" _Excuse me, sir?" the boy said in German, with a very polite demeanor._

" _Yes?"_

" _Do you know where my parents are..? I don't think your friend speaks German."_

" _He doesn't. And, sorry, kid, I don't know where they are."_

 _The boy's face fell. Logan knew he shouldn't, but he did._

" _What's your name? Maybe they got rescued..." –_ they didn't, they burned to feed the fire of an insane man- _"They have lists for that. What's your name?"_

" _Erik, sir." the boy said, polite even in the playground of death, "Erik Magnus Lensherr."_

* * *

Rogue stood up, disoriented, as Logan slipped away. Her newly-enhanced senses were assaulting her, persistently flooding her conscious perception. She clenched her fists and her claws tore their way out – the pain balanced the different signals. Charles, or whoever was there in his place, looked unimpressed.

"You won't get one step closer to me." he said, "So why not give up?"

"Ah don't hafta get closer ta you, ya piece of shit!"

Rogue took off, faster than she ever was before. She dashed towards Scott, who was shaking from head to toe, frozen where he was. She retracted the claws in her left hand, reached out and grabbed his arm. She pulled him along as she drained him, leading him in a semi-circle around the wheelchair. He was shuffling his feet, off-balance, unable to keep up but she knew that she would drain him enough to send him into unconsciousness soon. The only thing she was getting from him was a sickening, cosmic fear of being suspended in the absence of everything else.

"It's alright, sugah." She said, "It'll be alright. Ah'm here. You're safe."

Charles laughed out loud.

Scott missed a step and dropped. Rogue let him go. Without slowing down, she glanced at Jean to approximate her position. She was on the ground, either down for the count or out. Rogue turned her head towards Charles, who was turning his wheelchair around, following her lead. She unleashed a wave of blistering red optic energy his way, squinted just a little to adjust the width, and kept her eyes squarely on him as she continued to run towards Jean.

The blast hit a spherical, invisible shield and flowed around him, scraping the borders of his protective bubble. Rogue focused more, dilating her pupils to increase her output.

"It is admirable, the way you are trying." Charles-not-Charles remarked, "But time is on my side, I..."

Rogue went down on one knee. She grabbed hold of Jean's face, fingertips pressing against her soft skin.

* * *

 _Why can't anyone be like anyone in the same amount that they wish to be everyone else? Why does she, when she's staring at the ceiling, her eyes working out all the useless, bland little details of it in the half-dark, as she does whenever he's on top?_

 _Why does she think of a merry-go-round?_ _It finds her every time, the image. Dead horses spinning, their glazed over, polished eyes looking on, forever open, forever empty and he's thinking about all the details of herself that she can't shut out, that she can't lock behind a fence to keep out._

 _Kind of like her, whenever he's there. Her mind reaches out and grabs his, psi-fingers sliding across his sensorium, turning the mirror on herself._

 _The scent of her skin that she can't perceive, the warmth of her when he's inside her, the exact length and girth of her fingers, the way she fits into the palm of his hand..._

 _Split-love, split-sex, split-everything as the flood of emotion causes her, always, to hold on tighter, scared of the fall._

...and he likes it.

 _Every second of it and what was so wrong with him liking it?_

 _He tastes like Scott, only bitter and thinks that she's the best thing he's ever had, in bed or out of it and she just holds onto him, too afraid to let go, too afraid of the fall waiting for her down below... the heart of the merry-go-round..._

* * *

Rogue stood, feeling slightly woozy. Her head was throbbing, housing three echoes at the same time, a sensation she had forgotten a bit. She balanced herself, boots pressing down, and stood, poised. Her claws were out, her eyes were burning ( _it hurts like that all the time, I just forgot about it after a while)_ , and the voices in her head were rapid-firing different, conflicting strategies. The strain was threatening to overwhelm, and if she hadn't been constantly extending and retracting her claws, it would, easily.

Charles was simply sitting there, smiling.

"Marvelous." He said, "Utterly fascinating... you have all three, and you can use their gifts concurrently... well then." He opened his arms to his sides, "Take a shot, why don't you?"

"Oh, don'tcha worry, ya no 'count." Rogue spat, "Ah got more'n enough arsenal in me ta put ya down!"

Rogue retracted her claws, closed her eyes and focused. Her mind, now weaponized, shot forward, unseen but felt. It tore through the psychic barrier surrounding Charles Xavier's prominent forehead, his skull, his brain and went shooting into his mind. Charles began to laugh, his voice cracking up, growing more and more distant every second. Rogue felt very faintly her knees hitting the ground. There was a very slight sensation of something warm sliding out of her nose and down her lips, dripping to the floor as she kept pushing.

On the other side of the Danger Room, there was nothing but pitch-black inside that bald head of his, she saw... she saw...

There was nothing in Charles Xavier but living darkness.

He was practically howling now, the cackles growing more and more crazed with each passing second. Rogue shifted, sat on her heels. She kept probing. Where was the Professor..? Why was his mind-

" _Yes!"_ his voice echoed in her head, off-pitch, distorted, twisted... ugly, so ugly inside, ugly beyond description, hideous... " _Go deeper! You will find me!"_

Rogue realized then that she had fallen into a trap.

" _See, it just looks bottomless, but it is not, and right at the bottom, you will find evidence of me! Come, Anna Marie, do not disappoint me!"_

The Professor's face appeared in front of her eyes, just a disembodied head. As she watched, like a time-lapse video from a nightmare, he began to age. His face shifted, his cheekbones grew wider and higher. His cheeks sunk in, deep vales of heavily lined skin, and his chin shrunk, making the top of his head appear larger. Veins began to appear around his bald scalp, black veins drawing pathways amidst a flurry of aging spots. His forehead protruded forward, his eyes narrowed to slits.

Rogue heard a gasp somewhere in base reality. Maybe it was her own.

The face was Charles Xavier's, but as it parted its lips to laugh through crooked teeth, Rogue saw the feminine qualities of it – the witch behind the wise old mentor, the crone behind the bastard.

" _You went to great lengths to discover who you are..."_ she – _it, damn it, it's a monster!-_ said, _"...so why shouldn't I?"_

The last thing Rogue saw before everything faded out into the impenetrable black of sleep, was the vicious grin of Cassandra Nova.


	4. Mind Over Matter

" _ **Untouchable"**_

 **Chapter Three  
"Mind Over Matter"**

 **(I know there is more than we can see)**

The rain was gentle, pouring out of a sky turned gray. She saw her hand as it reached out, fingers eager, trying to catch the droplets. His hand, in turn, slid through her hair, tracing a half-circle around her scalp and came to rest on her cheek. His brow was furrowed, the glow of his eyes behind the ruby quartz glasses faint. He didn't look worried, he just looked... sad. She felt an ache in her chest, the knot there making its presence known.

"You don't have to move." He said, "Don't move."

Rogue looked. They were on a rooftop. Her head was on his lap.

There was a family rebars impaling her through the torso.

Oh.

There was no pain. Her body felt irrelevant somehow, as if it didn't matter at all that it was there.

"What happened?" she asked.

"You were so brave..." he said, his voice choking, "You were so strong..."

"Scott..?"

"It's me." he said, nodding, "I'm here."

"But Ah'm not safe... am Ah?"

"I'm so sorry." He said.

"It's alright." Rogue lifted a hand to caress his cheek, "You're here with me. Ah don't want nothin else."

Her body began becoming relevant again, chiming in. Pain was beginning to register.

"I saw it too late, I..." Scott choked, "I couldn't do anything."

"Shh, it's alright, sugah." Rogue said, feeling tears in her eyes, "It's alright. Ah've got you."

A sound in the distance. A dumpster being torn to shreds.

"Wha-"

"The others." He said, shaking his head, "The city is a maze. They'll never get out. If only it counted for something... I still can't save you."

"Ya don't have ta save me." pain, insistent, crying out for attention, "Ah'm too far gone. Ya just haven't noticed it, 'cause Ah ain't shown it to you yet."

"But I can." He said, "All you need to do is to let me."

"Ah want to. Ah want it... Ah want _you_."

A window breaking, far away and down the sprawling labyrinth.

Pain, singing. Humming nerve endings, so much like strings, being strummed furiously.

"Scott, it hurts..." Rogue whimpered.

"I know..." he said, caressing her hair, "I know."

Someone was screaming in the background.

* * *

Rogue woke up with a start, hands instinctively roaming her stomach, searching for the rebars. Her panic lasted only a few moments and subsided when she saw that she wasn't injured. Next to her, Scott stirred and tugged on the covers. Rogue's eyes darted all over the familiar surroundings of her room. Walk-in closet to her right, two dressers directly across, another closet, door half-open, to the left of _those_ and finally, to her left, the navy blue black-out curtains, slightly ajar to let in the pale daylight.

She ran a hand through her hair, trying to get herself to calm down.

The smell of the evening, of the slowly cooling concrete (the brick-and-mortar) was still fresh in her nostrils.

Rogue laid back down and let her thoughts run for a while, eye-contacting the ceiling. She hadn't had the dream in a good long while. This was her first since the Academy of Tomorrow. The dreams seemed to have deserted her along with the echoes, save for his that always kept her company.

She glanced at Scott, sleeping contentedly next to her.

 _You couldn't save me... but from what? An accident? Did I fall?_

 _...did I die?_

She reached out. Her fingertips lightly touched his back, feeling the muscles under his t-shirt. She could feel him breathing. It made her ache inside. She withdrew her hand.

So close, yet so far.

It was just fabric, preventing her from reaching his flesh. It was just flesh, keeping her away from his soul.

 _You couldn't save me... and the weird thing is, I don't think I wanted you to._

Her eyes darted to Scott's glasses, sitting on his bedstand. The frames, glaring even in the sparse light of a winter morning, were there, right where he always put them before switching to his goggles.

Rogue saw that the lenses were broken.

 _They aren't made of ruby quartz, she said..._

* * *

Carol stepped into Hank's lab, and stopped. She wasn't quite ready for the sight of him hanging upside down from what, to her, appeared to be a jungle gym mounted to the ceiling. He was as still as a statue, eyes rapidly scanning the pages of the book in his hand. She tried to catch the title, reading it flipped, and saw that it was Bob Woodward's _The Mutant Solution._ He seemed too engrossed in the book to notice her enter. She gently cleared her throat to announce herself.

Henry closed the book and smiled.

"Marvelous piece of fly-on-the-wall journalism." He said, "I always imagine Woodward as a small, ill-fitting figure in a meeting room in the Pentagon, crouched in a corner, short-handing every word that's being said onto a pad with a Uniball. It is as if he goes completely unnoticed by everyone else; like a ghost witness, who just happens to be a terrific writer."

"It's often been said." Carol said.

Hank jumped down with a graceful move, landed on his free hand, and pushed himself up. He slid the book into the side pocket of his white lab coat.

"You look lovely today." He said with a warm smile, "I suppose you want your results."

Carol smiled sheepishly.

"What's the diagnosis, doc?" she asked.

"Would you float for me, please?"

"Excuse me?"

"Would you float? I'm afraid there isn't enough space in here for you to fly."

Carol, confused, rose a few feet into the air, holding the exact same posture. It was as if she was still on the ground. Hank's eyes darted to her shoes, polished to perfection, to see if she had gone en pointe, as fliers tended to do. Subconscious aerodynamics, he called it. She, however, hadn't, which made her the only one in his repertoire of fliers.

"Fascinating." He said, "I don't know if you're manipulating your mass, or adjusting the gravity around you at will. It is usually the latter. What I do know, however, is that you are not doing it because of the X-Gene."

Carol dropped like a stone and stumbled, but managed to keep her footing.

"The X-Gene inhabits the 23rd chromosome," Hank said, "The reason is still unknown, but that's where the anomalies are. Your DNA, on the other hand, is perfectly normal – that is to say, there are no chromosomal anomalies that I could find. Simply put, Ms. Marvel, they were wrong in dishonorably discharging you for the reason that they did. You are not a mutant."

* * *

Charles pulled his tie into place. The knot was a bit thinner this time, he felt, but he also knew that he alone could tell the difference. He found bowties distasteful, and favored by and large by positive sciences professors. A tie was a catch-all, and it afforded him the image of an everyman, one of the sapiens, almost.

Almost. Not quite.

He secured the tie with his silver pin, a family heirloom. He began buttoning up the vest of his three-piece suit, from the bottommost button up.

It was routine, rigorously enforced, and it allowed him to focus his thoughts. Presently, however, nothing was helping with Logan standing there, hands in his jeans' pockets, looking at him expectantly.

"Can anything in the security systems corroborate that?" Charles asked. He took his jacket from the low hanger bar.

"No. Last thing Beast remembers is giving us to go-ahead. The security footage just shows you for hours. Nothin' 'bout how we ended up back in bed, right as rain."

"I suppose it is possible to manipulate the systems." Charles slipped the jacket on and worked at settling it – it'd be his skin for the day, "Any technopath would have the ability."

"Chuck, why're ya dodgin' the question?" Logan felt for the small device in his left pocket, "Ya _know_ we didn' jus' have the same nightmare."

"I am not." Charles turned his wheelchair around to face Logan, "But what would you have me do..? I cannot afford to disappear at such a crucial time. I cannot let the students know, because they would panic, and we are not in a position to afford mistakes borne from fear. So, I ask you: what would you have me do?"

Logan smiled.

"I have an idea, or three."

"I'm open to suggestions."

"Ya ain't gonna like it."

* * *

Carol sat down on the nearest available stool. Hank let her process what she had just heard. He himself was having trouble with the idea that a non-X-Gene carrier could possess the abilities that she did. To him, the prospect of studying her genetic make-up was an exciting prospect, and given that he had actually gotten quite a lot more than his DaVinci sleep last night, he was raring to go.

But Carol wasn't a lab animal, he knew, so he provided her with some human decency, so to speak.

"Then..." Carol licked her lips, "...what am I?"

"According to this," Hank pointed at a small mountain of spreadsheets and print-outs, "You are a baseline human. Nothing out of the ordinary, well, perhaps with the exception of your Chem 9. Every variable is perfect. It's almost machine-like, the way your body keeps everything at _exactly_ the median."

"But what does it mean?" Carol asked, "I am not a geneticist, Doctor, I'm a fighter pilot. At least, I used to be, and you're telling me that I lost everything because of too good health?"

"There are other ways to interpret it. I need a little more time."

"But is that close to your final diagnosis? Far as you can tell?"

"As far as anyone in this room, or up there can tell, you are..." Hank smiled, "...somewhat paradoxically, a _normal_ mutant."

Carol couldn't help but laugh.

* * *

Rogue practically kicked down the French doors leading to Charles' bedroom, storming in with her fists clenched. She ignored the mid-conversation that she had entered into, ignored Logan's hand rising to tell her to wait. She stood in front of the professor and with a flick of her wrist, threw him the frames of Scott's broken glasses. He caught it.

"Stripe, what're-" Logan began, but Rogue spoke.

"Explain." She said to Charles, "The first thing Cassandra Nova said was they wasn't made of ruby quartz. Scott optic blasted 'em to bits. How?"

Charles twirled the frames in his hand. The lenses were broken, and by the angling, he had no choice but to conclude that the force had come from the inner side.

"...Logan, I take that back. You are right." Charles said.

"Right about what?" Rogue asked.

"This may have happened once," Logan said, "But I'd put odds on it happenin' again. Call it bein' paranoid, I'll take it – but I'd rather take some precautions before squarin' off against _that_ psycho bitch."

Charles raised an eyebrow.

"I'm not gonna pull punches just 'cause she's in yer body." Logan said.

* * *

The day was indistinct for most, comprised mostly of trying to find a bit of joy in the sword of Damocles hanging over their heads. Each of them, even the most free-spirited, felt the weight of yesterday's decision. Some took to the streets of Bayville, much to the protestations of the other and their teachers, in attempt to try and enjoy what they were sure was their final days of freedom.

Kitty dragged Lance through every place that he had avoided, to show him everything that she had found wonderful about what had become her home. Whenever someone sneered at them, whenever someone yelled a portend of doom, she just raised her fist into the air in defiance, as if to say: mutant and proud.

Rogue spent her last day of freedom in the gazebo, wondering. If she had just been Anna Marie in the first place, she thought, none of this would have happened. Maybe Anna Marie would've been beautiful, maybe Anna Marie would've been a singer in some band nobody would ever hear of, and maybe Anna Marie could hold her lover's hand without panicking.

Or maybe Anna Marie didn't know who the fuck she was and the Rouge was always clearer.

* * *

The night came fast. Despite attempts to rest during the day, those chosen for Logan's vigil shuffled off to the locker room to put on their combat uniforms did so feeling tired already. When he got to the Danger Room doors, he found Jean waiting for him there. In full uniform, arms crossed, her face carrying her trademark come-fuck-with-me expression.

"I made the call, Red." Logan said with a sigh, "You're out."

"But why? You're perfectly fine with putting Scott in there!"

"Yeah, 'cause he ain't a telepath. I'm guessin' –and work with me here- if Cassandra Nova shares a body with Charles, she has access to his telepathy. And so yours."

"Mine?"

"Is Chuck a telekinetic or somethin'?"

"No. Well, just a little – every telepath is. He has enough power to move marbles, very small objects..."

"Not enough to tear chunks offa the walls, is what you're sayin'."

Jean thought about it. She hung her head.

"Yes."

"I thought that if somethin' tried to fuck with our heads in there, you'd come in. I was wrong. It turned you into a weapon against us, piggybacked on your power. Can't have it. 'sides, if shit goes south, I'd rather have the team leader where she can lead, not fightin' for her life in the crisis she's not even supposed to be managin', get me?"

Jean nodded.

"Now take that off and get to bed." Logan said, "If anythin' happens, I'll scream."

Logan smiled. Jean didn't.

* * *

Charles did not enjoy sleeping while wearing his day suits – it was something he had done many a night in his Harvard years, huddled in the corner of the library, clutching a book for dear life, trying to shut out the voices that his weariness kept letting in. This was not going to be quite the same, he knew. He was presently in the center of the Danger Room, having taken a relaxing bath, changed into a navy blue suit and refreshed, so to speak, for the night ahead. Around him, lining the edges of the room, was his guard detail for the night, and, he assumed, for the nights to come... at least until he was required to find a more permanent solution.

 _If_ the same thing happened.

His vigil consisted of Cyclops, Rogue, Jean and Logan, the same intercept team that had gone in the previous night. It was tactically sound, he had to admit: long-distance, jack of all trades, and killer. It disgusted him to think of Logan that way, but knowing that he was indeed the best at what he did didn't give him much of a choice.

There was, however, one more member, one that he didn't quite understand. Charles glanced over his shoulder, at Carol Danvers. She was standing there at full attention, as if she was just a cadet in the Lackland Base, her eyes locked onto him. She had been Hank's suggestion, and her role in a possible altercation was, as he had said, _the element of surprise._

" _Everything's all set."_ Hank's gentle voice faded in, _"Psi-shields are up. We're standing by, Charles."_

"Very well."

Charles held the neuro-suppressor firmly. It was round, black, made of some composite polymer that he couldn't identify. The side facing him had small, chrome claws lined in a circle, like the mouth of an octopus. The other side would have a chrome circle, and an LED light to indicate that it was working. He took a deep breath and steadied himself.

Then, with one swift move, Charles attached the device to his forehead. He registered the barest hint of a pinching sensation before all went black.

* * *

The first hour passed without incident. Nothing was said. It took most of them ten to fifteen minutes to start settling into more comfortable positions. Carol remained the same. Hank checked in every fifteen minutes to keep them focused. It failed after the first call. They started talking about the finer points of the Registration Act to pass the time. Hank joined in after not too long a while, correcting a mistake Rogue made – that the law wouldn't require them to out themselves as mutants, and the disclosure of mutant identities would be a felony. They would, however, be required to make the specifics of their mutations available to the government, most likely by submitting forms to be included in a database.

The discussion was nearing the slippery slope arguments when Carol shifted. All present turned their attention to her. She took one shaky step forward, and then another, and on the third, she dropped, limbs flailing as she fell. Scott moved, sprinting to get to Carol, followed by Rogue.

Carol crumbled in a heap on the ground, her eyes closed.

"The fuck is –" Logan began, but something hit him – lifted him up and slammed him against the glass of the observation deck. The force withdrew immediately after the impact, and let gravity do its work. Logan fell down with a metallic sound.

Scott turned towards Charles, hand on the firing stud, but as soon as his fingertips had touched it, his knees buckled. He went down fast, his consciousness slipping almost instantly.

"Scott!"

Rogue got to Scott's side and went down on one knee. She took him by the shoulders and began to shake him.

"Scott, come on!"

In her head, there was a whisper, faint but insistent:

 _The city is waiting._

Logan growled in frustration as he was lifted up again. He circled the air and slammed against the armored glass once more, creating splintering cracks, before being allowed to fall again, hands clawing the air.

Rogue's eyelids grew heavier and heavier, and she tried to hold on, but all she could do in the end was to grab hold of Scott's hand before she collapsed between him and Carol.

 _The streets aren't safe when you are there, Anna Marie._

* * *

"Hank!" Logan managed to let out as the glass crunched, the cracks growing wider every second, signaling that it was ready to break, "What the... fuck..."

Logan spun as he fell again, this time on her back, and before he hit the ground, he saw the bright overhead lights of the Danger Room, like the light at the end of the tunnel, gleaming.

* * *

Silence in the Danger Room. Quiet in the mansion. No sound recorded in the stock footage cameras left outside.

The first steps of Cassandra Nova echoed in the Danger Room as she stood from the wheelchair that had bound her brother for most of his life. She was used to the flurry of inputs, the unfiltered feedback of the physical; having a penis, for instance, when she wasn't supposed to. Feeling its presence there, still virile but forgotten, buried beneath the mind. The legs, too. Weaker than they were supposed to but still moveable with just a little telekinetic energy.

"Finally free." Cassandra said, Charles Xavier's voice already distorting into her own, "Finally born."

She inhaled deeply, drinking in the rich sensorium fuel of different scents, experienced through the noses present. Smelling, by proxy, the ripples made in their subconscious minds by the olfactory input. Freak perfume, distinguished not by the actual scents, their textures or indications, but by the experiences closely tied to each one. Metal, unconsciously smelt, was prison for one. Pain for another. Loss for another.

For her, it was pure pleasure.

"Welcome home." She said to herself and giggled like, as Charles would say, a schoolgirl.


	5. Element 2: Illusion

" _ **Untouchable"**_

 **Chapter Four  
"Element 2: Illusion"**

 **(Was du dir eigentlich am meisten wünschst)**

The room with glass walls was at the top of the skyscraper, open on all sides and baring everything. Inside, there was only a half-darkness, made of the pale hues the other city lights gave willingly. The shadow-bodies moving inside were shrouded in the absence of light.

It was the hotel suite.

Sometime, somewhere, someone.

Home ( _casing, shell_ ) to the unreality of the flesh. Detachment of skin, laced with sweat, smelling faintly of the otherwise heavy musk of need. Finite surfaces for infinitely vast maps, explored with fingertips, palms, tongues, lips and teeth. A shallow bite and a scratch and the soft layers were scraped off to be tasted – delicious, sickly-sweet, never enough, never enough.

Her breath was caught in her throat.

The ache inside of her subsided only for the fraction of a second every time. Not even for a single tick of the clock. His hair was tangled up in her fingers, and she was pulling, as if trying to tear his scalp clean off. His lips were on her neck, soft and wet and warm. He was under her, inside her, around her, pressed up against her and not close enough, not nearly close enough but oh, this would do for now, this would keep everything at bay.

Clenched teeth as he gave her everything she needed. His tongue lashing around, trying to shape useless words on her skin, but she didn't care to speak.

Anna Marie didn't exist.

The all-consuming unreality of the flesh was all there was, and the burning knot between her legs, the aching string of knots running up her spine and spreading throughout her was all she wanted to touch.

* * *

Cyclops came to in a familiar room. It was a motel somewhere. He could tell from the familiar fixtures, the cheap furniture, the piano-wire tense sheets covering the rough bed he was lying on. From the slightly-open curtains in front of the ajar window, the asphalt soundtrack of the night road bled through.

He was still in his uniform, still had his visor on, and the last thing he recalled was everything in his vision starting to float up... which he now knew had been him, collapsing.

His hand went to the side of his visor, to the button behind his ear that turned on his com-link.

"This is Cyclops, anyone copy?"

Nothing but light static.

"This is Cyclops, is anyone out there?"

Static, hissing.

"Everyone, fall in!"

Hiss.

He shut the com-link off. He sat up, and something dropped from his chest onto his lap. A card. He took it. There was an inscription in neat cursive, next to a crudely-drawn cross:

 **A home for every soul and every soul in their homes.**

"What..?"

Cyclops threw it away. He got up and went to the window and peered through the opening in the curtains. Asphalt, ending in a stretch of dirt specked with faded shrubbery, and beyond that, it seemed, was nothing. Just the distance. His brow creased. The memory of it was clear in his mind, the first roadside motel he had pulled into on the second day... on the way to Chicago, months ago.

 _I remember hearing her in a dream._

He turned around and took the room in. It brought a bitter taste to his mouth as his innate sense of geometry worked the angles and found them off. Everything was a bit smaller than they had been in his memory, angled a bit differently. The edges were sharper here, and distances a bit shorter, if only by mere millimeters. Scott walked around the room to get a feel for it, and found that his final step would be interrupted by something or other, every time.

 _But the boundaries are the same. This is the room, right down to that ugly pattern on the armchair. Why is it like this?_

He went for a second round, this time taking smaller steps. It measured exactly; the toes of his boots touched the obstacles on the last step, every time.

Cyclops shivered.

 _Rogue is that much shorter than me._

He glanced at the door. Closed. It didn't seem unlocked.

 _This isn't the room. This isn't how I remember it, either._

 _Of course it isn't._

 _This is_ her _memory of the room._

His hand went to firing stud of his visor. He focused on the door handle and fired. A bright red beam punched the handle through the door and left a hole in its place. The door swung open, inviting in the cool night air.

 _At least my powers work. That's good to know._

A sound, behind him, alerted him. He turned, finger on the firing stud, and saw that the lights were on in the bathroom. He approached slowly, carefully. He reached out and grabbed the door handle.

Cyclops opened the door and looked inside.

The streaks in her hair made it known that it was her. Her face was a shifting, distorted mess, and she had many arms moving, many legs open, many mouths and many breasts and as she shifted, her body an indistinct blur twitching against the tiles... a moan escaped her lips, white noise vibrating and echoing...

He turned away and ran without a second thought. He practically threw himself out the door, dashed across the road and kept running.

He didn't stop until he was sure the motel wasn't following him.

* * *

Logan opened his eyes and a sharp pain gripped his head. He squeezed them shut and felt around his face for the cause. He found a jagged piece of armored glass stuck in his left eye socket. Judging by the angle, his eyeball had exploded and then healed around the shard.

"Ah, fuck me..."

He gripped it tightly and pulled it out. His eyeball came loose with it and fell to the floor. He kept his eye shut as his nerves began to regenerate, sending thin strands of agony throughout his skull. He blinked with his good eye and, cursing his sudden lack of depth perception, looked around to find Hank McCoy still sitting by the control console, head on the keys, fast asleep. The observation window that he had gone through was broken.

He remembered smashing into it repeatedly, pushed by a surge of telekinetic energy, until it had finally caved in.

Logan stood up. He brushed off small pieces of glass hanging onto his skin, pulled out a few stray shards and stumbled over to Hank's side. He checked for a pulse. It was there. He grabbed Hank's shoulders.

"Beast. Hey. Wake up, big fella, come on."

Logan shook him to no avail. He tried harder. His eye, whole again, made itself known and he opened it. His vision adjusted quickly, and that's when he saw it: the impenetrable pitch-black that was beyond the observation screen.

"What the hell..?"

He leaned over and snatched Hank's com-link. He clicked and waited.

" _Beast?"_ Ororo's voice, groggy.

"Ororo, it's Logan." Logan grunted. With one hand, he reached over the console, fingers outstretched, reaching for the darkness, "Everythin' went to shit down here. Get some of that industrial strength acetaminophen and get down here, yeah?"

His fingers stopped. He pushed further. His hand wasn't going any further, but he couldn't feel a barrier stopping him, either.

" _Give me five minutes."_

"Bring Kitty, Jean and the elf."

" _Why them?"_

Logan threw a punch at the big black. He didn't hit anything. His muscles contracted when his fist met the black, but there was no impact on his knuckles.

"Just do it, 'ro."

" _Understood. Storm out."_

* * *

Carol heard the voice before she opened her eyes. The voice of a crone - old, razor-sharp, dripping with sweetness and venom.

"You are _very_ interesting creature." She was saying, "I can devote some of my attention, I should think, to studying you."

Carol could feel Cassandra's breath as she leaned closer to her ear.

"You _perplex_ me."

Carol shivered as she felt a single finger run down the nape of her neck.

"What are you? Hm?" Cassandra asked, "Your mind isn't that of a human. Your brain isn't that of a mutant."

 _Keep your eyes closed. Feign sleep._

"That will not do you any good. But, if it's any comfort, please do feign sleep."

 _Subvert._

"I just don't want to look at your ugly face." Carol said.

"I know for a fact that you thought my brother was quite handsome, Ms. Danvers. Given that I do know what tactics you will employ, I would suggest you focus on the question at hand: what are you?"

Carol opened her eyes. All she saw was a blinding, white light. She squinted, and saw a circle around the light. A lamp. She strained to look down.

 _What the..._

Y-incision, running right down to her crotch. Flaps of skin pulled to both sides. Bisected alive, without pain, without any sensation at all. Rib cage, whiter than she knew, and the organs underneath. Shackled by her ankles, and by the feel of it, wrists too.

She bit back a scream. She expected the re-run of when she had gotten an HV-hollow point to the shoulder, the pain registering only when the wound was acknowledged... she waited for the agony, but it never came.

"Oh, it wouldn't. I shut off your pain response." Cassandra Nova said. Carol looked around, but the light was too bright for her to see anything else. She heard a clank – metal on metal. "Took some doing." Cassandra Nova added, "The mechanism was a bit different."

Footsteps. She leaned over and Carol saw the distorted face of Charles Xavier – wrinkles, aging spots and lines instead of his smooth skin. His Adam's apple was gone, and his features were softer, more feminine.

The face of the crone, the very twisted idea of Charles Xavier. The distortion.

"Will you elaborate..." Cassandra Nova demonstrated a number 22 scalpel, "...or should I?"

"I don't know what you're talking about." Carol replied, "As far as I know, I'm a mutant. You've read my mind. You know that's true."

Cassandra Nova stabbed the scalpel into her shoulder. She felt nothing.

"Did you know that the rib cage can be opened without hurting a single rib?" Cassandra Nova asked, "I think I'll turn your pain response back on to demonstrate..."

* * *

The city, in the distance, glowing. Little haloes in the dark.

Sweet exhaustion and muscles shaking off the strain, unknotting one by one. The sheets were an ocean during a squall, the waves frozen to envelop her body. She untangled herself slowly, wanting to be exposed. Her toes found his leg, and she pressed them against his skin. He was as still as a statue, as if unaffected. Warm and welcoming with his open arms.

Breathing heavy, she found the red dots that were his eyes.

"That was..." she sighed, "...thank you."

He smiled. She died inside.

"My pleasure." He said.

"Was it? Ah feel like Ah... just took. Again."

"Sometimes, giving is enough."

She inched closer and wrapped herself around him.

"Ah don't wanna just take from you anymore. Ah wanna give you everythin you want." Her fingers tap danced on his chest, "Anythin you want. All ya gotta do is ask."

"Can you stay?"

Between the bed and the door was a gulag, barren and cold.

"Ah ain't goin nowhere." She said, "Ah got all the time in the world."

"Aren't you forgetting something?"

Between the bed and the door was the first stretch of the wasteland for the runaway.

"Nothin Ah need." She whispered, looking away, "Ah wanna stay here forever."

"Forever just passed by, Anna Marie."

There was nothing between the bed and the door, nothing but empty space.

Rogue turned away.

* * *

The aurora borealis was painting the night time sky with hues of blue, green and turquoise, drawing majestic, misty lines across the starry black overhead. The nausea was constant because of it, and Cyclops did his best not to look up: it wasn't the Northern lights themselves, just that the shapes were all wrong. Too concise, too many different lines intersecting in the most random of ways. Concise and sloppy at the same time. Angular chaos.

"This is Cyclops, anyone copy?"

There was no response, just like the first ten miles that he had walked. He hoped it wouldn't be the case for the next ten, or at the very least, not for the ten after that. He didn't know where he was walking to, or if there was someplace to reach at all. There was nothing to steer himself by, as even the Northern Lights didn't seem to indicate anything; for all he knew, they were omnidirectional in their guidance.

As he walked on, a shape began to appear in the distance. Cyclops started to jog towards it. Protruding from a rather large mass on the ground was something sharp, standing at an angle. 43.3 degrees. A familiar shape.

On approach, he began to distinguish the small windows lining the main body. Glass, paler than the rest of it. The shape was white, by his estimate – on the very edge of red.

Scott sped up, getting closer. He saw the cracks on the surface, the gashes marring the exterior, closer...

...his steps began to slow. He stopped.

There, in the middle of the desert, was the wreckage of a passenger plane, lying on its side, with the right wing standing tall, and the hatch... exactly how he remembered it, that very same hatch, standing the way he recalled it did as he had fallen from it: fully open, forming a gap on the hull, like a mouth that had just vomited him and his...

The same passenger plane, his trauma recollection told him, that he had leaped out of when he was a child.

 _What's..._

 _This is..._

 _What's going on!?_

* * *

Kitty wished she hadn't come down in her flip-flops. Their bottoms were flat, and they weren't doing too well on the smooth, metallic surface of the control room. Awake but still yearning not to be, she clenched her teeth and kept pushing. Her shoulders were starting to get a bit sore, and she was beginning to get angry.

"Anythin'?"

"Mister Logan, if you ask me that one more time, I'll phase you into a wall and leave you there." Kitty hissed, "I'm trying, okay?"

Her audience consisted of Storm, Wolverine, a very sleepy Kurt who was trying to nod off where he stood, and Jean, whose telepathic touch Kitty was acutely aware of. It was like a shadow-hand gripping her brain lightly, tweaking her various responses to enhance her ability.

Kitty grunted in frustration and punched the black. She couldn't. Her fist just stopped, without impact, without even that satisfactory sound of an impact.

"It's so _annoying_!" she said with a frustrated huff, "It's like, nothing's supposed to be there, but something _is_ , but it's not anything, and it won't let me through!"

"You did just fine, Shadowcat." Storm said with a reassuring tone, "Let Kurt try now."

"Vha-" Kurt snapped to attention.

"Yer up, bub." Logan said, "See if you can 'port into that."

"Vhat, and go in blind? Do you knov hov dangerous zhat is?"

"I'll help you with a mental projection of the room." Jean said, "The distance isn't too great. You can estimate it."

" _Ja_ , and end up falling to my death, or vhatever _zhat_ thing is supposed to be..."

"Just do it, Kurt." Kitty said as she sat down, "I did my part."

"Tell my mother I..." Kurt smiled, "...actually, second thought - don't."

He glared at the black, his tail swishing back and forth. He felt Jean probing his mind, piecing together an accurate picture of the Danger Room. The transparent, double-vision outline of the Danger Room settled into place and allowed him to gauge where to teleport to. Neat trick. He licked his lips.

With a resounding _BAMF,_ Kurt disappeared, leaving only the smell of fire and brimstone behind. A second later, _BAMF,_ and he appeared, two feet above where he had started. He landed on his feet, shook, and used his tail to balance himself.

"Vhat the-" Kurt shook his head, "Alright. Again!"

 _BAMF!_ He disappeared.

 _BAMF!_ He reappeared right above the control console and came down hard, landed on his side, rolled off and fell down.

"Kurt, are you okay?" Kitty asked, standing up.

"Zhat does it!" Kurt pushed the ground and stood up, "Get a taste of-"

Kurt began teleporting. In no time at all, the room was infused with the infernal smell of his passage, and he was almost in many different places at once – he kept teleporting, reappearing and teleporting again, until finally, with a guttural growl, he vanished, only to emerge, shoot through the air and crash right into Logan. Logan shook, but didn't shift. He caught Kurt by the arm as he landed, and gently lowered him down. Kurt laid on his back.

"Kurt!" Jean was rubbing her temples, "You could've warned me, you know."

"What did he do?" Storm asked.

"Same question." Kitty said.

"He used my projection to get a fix on a spot, and then teleported multiple times to build momentum and aimed himself straight at it." Jean explained, "He called it 'slingshotting' in his head."

"Alright." Logan said. He sighed, "Time to call it."

"We're not done yet, Mister Logan." Kitty said, "Maybe I can-"

"No, half-pint. Ya tried. So did he."

Kurt gave him a tired, defeated thumbs-up.

"But the professor's still in there." Jean said, "And Scott, and Rogue..."

"Not to mention Ms. Marvel." Storm added.

"I ain't sayin' we oughtta just give up. I'm just sayin' we might use a little help with this. A different kinda help."

"What do you have in mind?" Storm asked.

"Jean, put something casual on." Logan said, "Elf, you can go."

"Five more minutes..."

"On your own time, Wagner."

"Finally..." Kitty yawned. She stretched. "I'm going back to bed."

"No." Logan said, "Go get yer sweetheart."

"Lance? Why?"

"'cause I said so. C'mon, hustle!"

"Fine." Kitty huffed, tired.

"Come down to the garage." Logan said, "We're goin' on a little midnight ride."

* * *

"Why do they call you Ms. Marvel?"

Carol was trying to hold onto a piece of training with all her might. She was trying desperately to picture scenarios in which she could break free and break Cassandra Nova's neck with the flick of her middle finger. It was a psychological defense tactic: lessen your enemy, make them smaller. Strip them of their apparent power enough times to begin finding hope, with the added benefit of dehumanizing them in the process... not that Carol needed any help with that. She had spent what had felt like the past hour watching Cassandra Nova pull back her ribs, one by one, just to pull her insides out, one organ at a time, and poke at each one while murmuring random anecdotes about seemingly anything under the sun. From chemistry to art to serial killers to the mind of mafia hitmen, an endless stream of bullshit came pouring out of her mouth.

Carol knew that Cassandra Nova was a monster. A monster she was at the mercy of.

But she was no closer to a plan than when her ribs weren't in full bloom. Her only other tactic was to stall.

"It's just my call sign. I earned it." Carol replied.

"Earned it?" the sound of her tools, bone saw and speculum, hitting the tray, "What did they call you when you hadn't earned it just yet?"

" _Twizzler_." Carol said, staring at the rim of the lamp hanging above, "I'm addicted to the stuff."

"Fascinating. A title earned, a title lost."

"Nobody lost anything. I'm still Ms. Marvel." Carol said, "Stitch me back up and I'll show you why that is."

Cassandra Nova chuckled, a sound more akin to choking on one's own phlegm than laughter.

"I am glad you are such a conversationalist." She commented, "My work would be quite boring otherwise."

"Your work? Cutting me to pieces, you mean?"

"Come now, were you always such an egotist? This is a bit of fun. On the side -a distraction- nothing more."

Scraping sound, thin metal on a larger metal surface. Perhaps another scalpel.

"Then what's your work, Ms. Nova?" Carol asked, trying to keep her tone as cordial as possible.

"It's more my brother's work, really. What he's been doing... what he has done. What he has done with this place... which I will show you once I manage to see if your optic nerves work the same as a human's would."

"This is about Charles Xavier?"

"It is _always_ about Charles Xavier. You don't really think that the Mutant Registration Act or the prospect of an army of Sentinels actually moved him to anything, inspired him to anything, do you? There is a reason for everything that has happened so far, Ms. Marvel, including this unconventional autopsy."

"You're going to kill me, is that it?"

"Kill you? My dear, what use are you to me if you are dead? You have come to no harm so far."

"I can see how long my large intestine is from here. I'd say no harm is too shitty a lie at this point."

"Ugh!" Cassandra Nova's face appeared again, next to her, right at the edge of her vision "If it were that simple, what makes you think I would draw this out?"

"Because you are a sadist?"

"Such limited imagination. Hold still." Carol felt thin fingers on her head, and a scalpel, thin and sharp, came into her vision as Cassandra steadied her eyelid under her thumb, "I'm going to need your eyes out of their sockets for a bit."

"W...wait... wait a m-minute..."

"Let's see how you see."

The scalpel was getting closer... closer...

* * *

But the delight was the same every time, same with every movement; from the gentlest to the hardest one.

Strands of hair, freshly plucked, tangled up in grasping fingers. Butterfly kisses with their teasing half-existence. Movement in the calm waters of a lake, a tsunami brewing in the deep, bubbling to the surface like a corpse bloated from the water, filled to the brim with the source of all life.

"Ah love you..." She whispered as she moved, slowly, teeth clenched, the roots of her hair damp with sweat, " _Ah love you."_

"An angel is like you, Kate." He said, drilling holes into her with his eyes, "And you are like an angel."

She stopped. She could hear her heart beating out of her chest, her ragged breathing. She looked up, away from him and at the city in the distance, still glowing, still blinking playfully.

Timelessness, she felt. Outside and in.

"Ah'm no angel." She said. Her lips descended to give him a brief kiss, her eyes still glued to the window, "Ah'm no angel at all, sugah."

"Why not?"

Rogue bit her tongue. It took everything she had to detach. To move away. Her feet found the carpet, and she walked up to the window. In the half-illumination of the city lights, she saw herself. The goddess, the whore. One hand reached to touch the glass.

He hadn't moved.

"It's not what Ah wanted ta feel. Ah can't help that."

"Didn't say you could... or should."

"Ah always felt that Ah was holdin you back. Imprisonin you, ya know? You'd be happier without me. Everyone would."

"Why do you get to decide that and not me? Or the rest of us?"

"'cause it's _mah_ dream to be close to you like this. Ya probably dream of somethin else. Somethin better than just... ya know... me." there was still the ache inside of her, an unfinished delight, "God... how long has it been..? How many times did we..?"

"Does it matter?"

Rogue's brow creased. She glanced at her right. Between the bed and the door, there was nothing, but somehow, it seemed an impossible distance. It was colder on the outside. Sharper. Less. There, with him, it was all-

"Wait." She said, "Since when have Ah been asleep?"

A moment's silence. She could hear her heart pounding in her chest.

"What makes you think you're asleep?" he asked, his voice full of mischief, "Maybe you can finally have everything you ever wanted."

He moved to the edge of the bed and stood up, twin supernovas glowing red in their sockets to tell her that he was looking at her. Her and nothing else.

"Maybe there's nothing out there waiting for you, and everything else is in here." Scott continued.

"Don't be that way. Ah need you ta not be that way. Ah don't want you ta."

Scott ignored her.

"And would it be so bad if you did?" he asked.

"Stop it..."

"Stop why? _You_ don't want to stop. You never did."

He took a step towards her. She tried to retreat, but there was nowhere to go. Cold glass pressed against her naked back.

"So why's this any different?" he asked her, "You can take whatever you want. You can take it all. Have it all. _Everything._ "

Rogue choked. Her hands were shaking. The delight, the desire, the ache, the knot, they had all vanished, replaced by cold sweat. She felt like she was slowly being covered in ice-cold water, head to toe as he stood there, shrouded in shadow and ambient light with his tongue made into a weapon.

"You're not Scott..." she managed, "You're not-"

"I _am_. And I never lied to you, did I? I'm not lying now. You don't have to let me go."

"Stop it!"

Scott threw his head back and laughed. Rogue shuddered. Still chuckling, he reached for her. His hand hovered, almost touching her face.

"Isn't this what you want?" he asked.

"Not like this." She said.

Rogue shoved him to the side and looked around for her clothes. She spotted the telling, bright yellow of her shoulder pads on the ground, behind the bed.

"And where're you gonna go, Anna Marie?" he asked, his back turned to her, "There's nothing out there for you, you know that! That's why you made this place!"

Rogue separated the few articles of clothing she had and started getting dressed. She had pulled her uniform up to her waist when she felt his hands on her shoulder, his breath on her neck.

"That's right." He said with a nod, "This is where you come to be free. Free of the fabrics, the clothes, the walls. Free of being scared of how much you want the things you do. Free to be yourself - not the Rogue, not Anna Marie, not some girl nobody even remembers anymore."

Rogue shrugged him off and continued pulling on the uniform, the soft, durable fabric an unexpected comfort.

"Ya don't know what free means, whoever you are... 'cause if Ah can't be out there, Ah got no reason to come here no more." she said, "If this is all Ah got, then this is mah prison. And Ah am _through_ bein a prisoner."

She slipped on her gloves and flexed her fingers. Perfect fit.

"I have the key." He said, demonstrating it. A pinhead point on the curve of its head gleamed. A speck of pure light.

Rogue went to the door.

"No. Ya don't." she said, "Ya never did. And it doesn't even matter." She turned the knob, "The door's open, like always."

"You know that I'm right."

"Even if, Scott... Ah never wanted what you couldn't give me from you."

Rogue stepped outside and closed the door behind her.

* * *

It had took Cyclops a good long while to stop staring at the wreckage and to continue moving. He circled around it, kept walking and didn't look back.

He slowly sped up, broke into a jog and then a run, trying to put as much distance between himself and the memory as possible.

 _The Professor called it a mnemonic maze. Made from my memories._

He pressed the firing stud on his visor as he ran and started drawing a straight line in front of him.

 _That's why my powers work. My mind believes this is real, my body responds accordingly._

He shut it off when he decided it was enough.

 _Is this Cassandra Nova's doing? Did she trap me here? The last thing I remember..._

Cyclops climbed a hill without breaking stride, the rough earth under his boots crunching with every step.

Suddenly, the ground disappeared and he dropped like a stone. He came down hard and felt his teeth rattle in his skull. The world refused to balance itself for a few seconds.

"What the hell..."

When he looked, he saw that the hill he had climbed was cut short by the asphalt. The road, he saw, simply jutted up at a 90-degree angle, as high as the hill itself, with the dirt still visible around it, forming a wall.

There was a white word on the road-wall that looked like it was stenciled in:

 **YOU**

Cyclops stood up. He glanced at the road on the other side of him. It was a familiar sight – straight as an arrow, stretching on and on and vanishing into the horizon. From where he was, he could see the barest hint of shapes on the horizon; far, certainly, but there and stretching wide.

He looked down. He was standing on another stenciled word.

 **FOR**

 _You for?_

 _No._ For you _._

He faced the wall and started to jog backwards, revealing more words, only in reverse order. He stopped when regular road lines appeared, revealing the message.

 _...just what is this place?_

The message was clear. The words sent a shiver down his spine.

 **THERE**

 **IS**

 **NOTHING**

 **OUT**

 **THERE**

 **FOR**

 **YOU**


	6. The Witching Hour

" _ **Untouchable"**_

 **Chapter Five  
"The Witching Hour"**

 **(A trip to my conscience)**

The hotel was dead quiet, but even in that silence, Rogue could still hear his voice, echoing in her head. Her steps were clumsy, she was shuffling her boots through the fibers of the carpeting underneath. One of her hands was on the wall, scaling the rough surface.

She was barely aware that she was crying, that the reason why she couldn't see properly was the tears blurring her vision.

The confirmation was still fresh in her mind, mingling with the sickening aftertaste of rotten delight. To hear it all from him, to hear him tell her what she knew, what she _was_...

Taking it all. The thought set her teeth on edge.

Between the emptiness that was the Rogue and the hollow promise that was Anna Marie, there was never any breathing room. Having to be both, or either, but rarely neither, had made identity into just another constant crisis in the making.

 _I'm not an ungrateful bitch._

The kisses goodnight, his fingers through her hair, his palm on her cheek... all wonderful, all cherished, the mere existence of her sense of touch rewarded for the first time.

But it wasn't enough.

 _Because I see them every day, and I hear them at night, and every time, it's something I can't give you... and you know it. You touch me, and I know that you know it, because you feel it's better that I just know than you ever admit it to yourself._

But that wasn't it. It wasn't the sad parody of contact that he wanted. He was not afraid to let her know that he wanted her, to let her know how much and more importantly, why.

 _Because you look at me, and you see this ugly mess, and you think I'm beautiful... and sometimes, you're afraid to confess that the world can end tomorrow._

To have it all. Have what? Even sharing a bed, she held him until he fell asleep, and then scooted over, putting as much distance between herself and his skin, the skin she wanted to taste, to touch. Praying to whatever God was ignoring her to make it through the night. Waking up every morning, thanking whatever God was ignoring her that she hadn't killed him in his sleep.

Trying to settle into his arms with the constant tension gnawing at her from the inside.

 _Take it all from you? Do whatever I want to you?_

 _Who the fuck do you think I am, when even I don't know?_

The hallway seemed to go on forever.

* * *

The china plate flew straight, spinning as it went, and Toad barely had time to duck before it shattered on the wall, spilling the sweet-and-sour variation on the tomato sauce that he had tried out. Family recipe, borne from a desire to have an equivalent of and a competitor to General Noli's chicken. Made to compliment plain egg noodles. Enough carbohydrates to satisfy most.

"I swear, man, one 'a these days, she's gonna get me good. They're not even gonna find the body." Toad murmured to himself. He stared at the remains on the floor. Shards of china, noodles, sauce, seasoning. It was nice to be able to afford these things now, as opposed to instant Ramen, but he still didn't like it going to waste.

"I don't need something to _eat_!" she screamed from what used to be Mystique's room, "Stop coming up here with this shit, _Toad_ , or you're gonna lose your tongue!"

"Alright, alright!" Toad put his hands up, "I'll tell Fred to turn it down, seriously, Wanda - just chill, yeah?"

"Did you just tell me to _chill_?"

Toad wasn't brave enough to peer around the corner. He preferred the relative safety of where he was.

 _Where the fuck is Pietro anyway, he said a walk, it's been like, two hours... fuck, he's probably in Bora Bora or somewheres by now._

 _And it's not like he'd know what to do anyway._

"Nah, what I mean was, uhhh, y'know, if ya need anythin' you can-" the bedside lamp joined the plate in death, and Toad considered himself lucky that it was an object and not one of her spells, "Whoah, whoah! Alright, message received - I'm going, I'm going!"

He heard Wanda slam her door closed.

Toad shook his head. She had always been somewhat temperamental, but for a few nights now, she was acting as neurotic as she had before the Mastermind-fuck that had helped her hurt less, somehow.

A knock on the front door interrupted his thoughts.

"Fred!" Toad yelled, "Get the door!"

"Why me? The debate's 'boutta start!"

"I don't give a fuck who's debasin who yo, just get the damn door! Just remember, we ain't buyin' anything!"

"Get it yourself!"

"Man, I gotta do everything around here..."

Toad leapt onto the wall and started zigzagging between it and the railing on the staircase. He timed it just right to have his final bounce off of the wall, down the last steps and he landed in front of the door. He glanced at the living room, where Fred, sitting in his own special armchair, was lost in whatever news report was reflected on the wall-mounted flat screen.

Sometimes, Toad suspected he just liked watching anything, just so long as it was in HD. Magneto's Brotherhood was paying off at last.

The door was knocked on again, this time more insistently.

"Alright, I'm here."

Toad opened the door and came face-to-face with Lance, who was standing there, hands in his sweatpants' pockets, looking at him with that puppy-dog look that Toad hated with a passion. Toad opened the door all the way, to step out and to lay it on him. That was when he saw Kitty, that Wolverine guy, and the redhead Fred was still so big on.

X-Men.

"Oh hell no." he said, and slammed the door in Lance's face.

* * *

His voice echoed throughout the empty streets, scattering into the air every time he called out.

"Hello! Can anyone hear me?"

Echoes, fading.

"Shit... okay. I made it this far... however far that is."

A terrible sense of déjà-vu came over him. Cyclops shrugged it off.

All around him, there was the terrible silence of skyscrapers; steel alloy, concrete and glass. Soulless, nondescript, a parade of blank slates on both sides of the avenue, watching without a single sound. Cyclops felt on edge, not because vast, open spaces unnerved him, but because it was too damn silent.

He tried to make sense of his surroundings. Night had fallen from the moment he had stepped into the city itself, the daylight marked by a very clear line on the ground. His path was illuminated by the annoying hues of the street lamps, painting bright red spots onto the field of vision afforded to him by his visor.

If this was based on his memories, so far, it sure looked like somewhere he had never been to in his life.

The avenue he was on had a strange curvature, disturbingly subtle, seeming straight but going in a drawn-out semi-circle. The streets so far had been perfectly normal: black tar road, white lines separating the lanes. Identical, red-brick buildings on his right hand side, bicycle paths on the sidewalk to his left. On his left, after a stretch of grass marked by the flattened semi-circle of the avenue was a lake, its surface calm and the water dark.

The apartments were all dead. The windows on his side appeared to be windowpanes installed onto straight walls, just for show. None of them had any glass, baring instead the irregular grid of cement lines. He saw bulbs embedded into the triangular arches of the entrances, but they were emitting no light.

He could see a larger skyline close to where he was, but close in a New York sense – blocks and blocks and blocks away, appearing right next door due to their sheer size. He could see lights on in the skyline, a direct contrast to the blend of urban and suburban he was walking past now. If his internal sense of geometry was correct, then the avenue should've curved to the point where it'd let him get to the city in about half a mile, give or take.

A sound drew his focus. The scraping of metal, the trickling of masonry set loose, and a growl he would recognize anywhere. Wolverine. Cyclops took soft steps, not wanting to lose the sound, but before he could figure out where it was coming from, Wolverine stumbled onto the avenue.

Cyclops froze.

To say he was emaciated would be an understatement. He was little more than meat hanging onto an adamantium skeleton, barely able to hold its own weight up. His hair was a collection of stray strands. There was blood all around his mouth – his claws, extended, were also stained.

Wolverine let out a strangled snarl when he saw Scott.

"Wolverine..?" Cyclops inquired, cautious. His fingers were itching for the firing stud of his visor.

"Yer 'live..." Logan managed, smacking his lips between words, "Bet yer tasty like _her_..."

Cyclops scratched the itch, but didn't fire.

"...like who?" he asked.

"Red." Wolverine grinned a vicious, if partially toothless grin, "Went down first. Thought I'd... heh... keep my strength up."

"What happened to you..?"

Wolverine took a step forward, flaps of skin around his leg moving as he did. Cyclops took a step back in response.

"Whatcha think..?" Wolverine breathed, " _I'm dyin' here, bub!"_

Wolverine launched at Cyclops, claws at his side, cringing with every step. Cyclops didn't wait. He pressed the firing stud. The red beam stalled Wolverine, digging into him hard. After a moment or two, the pressure built up, and Wolverine's chest burst open – Cyclops saw, through the light, the concussive blast forcing his ribs open. The rays bled through the gaps between adamntium vertebrae and folded them in.

When Cyclops finally took his fingers off the firing stud, Wolverine had been severed in two.

Cyclops stood still, his heart pounding in his ears, cold sweat pouring out of every pore... staring at an empty street.

Instinct took over and Cyclops began to run. He ran as if the devil himself was right at his heels, tracing the curvature of the avenue, hurtling towards the blinking lights of the city.

* * *

The door was knocked on more forcefully the second time. Toad just knew that this couldn't be good news. The X-Men had obviously just come to their door to sing Christmas carols, 'cause they never did that... well, except for that one time. Besides which, it wasn't Christmas.

With a heavy sigh, he opened the door again.

"Yo Fred!" Toad called out, "Take a look at this! It's our not-enemies!"

"Not-enemies?" Logan asked, unsure if he wanted to know.

"Like frienemies." Kitty said. It didn't clear things up for Logan – he had given up on trying to follow any lingo some forty odd years ago.

"What she said." Toad concurred, "We're not enemies, but we're not friends neither, yo."

Toad clocked Lance, sweatpants and torn t-shirt, standing behind Logan.

"Except for that asshole." He said, an accusing index finger pointing at Lance to emphasize the point, "Him, we're definitely enemies with."

"Just be glad I'm not here to fight, Tolansky." Lance snarled half-heartedly.

"I don't have time for this." Logan grunted. His claws came out as he grabbed Toad by the collar of his shirt and effortlessly lifted him up, "Listen, bub, we need to talk to the Scarlet Witch. You got any objections, I might just be hungry for somethin' French tonight. Get me?"

Toad started kicking, his legs moving uselessly in the air. He squirmed, struggled, tried every which way to wriggle out of Logan's vice grip.

"I swear..." Fred put down the cereal box he was set on making an origami boat out of and stood up. He closed the front of his robe for decency's sake and headed to the door. His steps shook the ground. He came over and snatched Toad clean out of Logan's hands and helped him perch up on his shoulder. He smiled sheepishly at the redhead standing next to Wolverine, "Hey, Jean."

"Hello, Fred." Jean said, smiling back, "You look well."

"Been eating better." Fred grinned, "So you guys're here for Wanda, huh?"

"Yes, please." Jean said.

"I'll get her. Just don't hurt this little guy, yeah? He just doesn't know when to stop talking sometimes."

"Don't worry." Jean said, "We won't hurt him. You have my word."

"Did I miss a memo or somethin'?" Toad said, perched atop the Blob's shoulder, "Didn't you like, kidnap her and do the creepy Norman Bates thing that one time?"

"See what I mean?" Fred asked as he put Toad back on the ground. Toad adjusted his shirt, crossed his arms and stood there, glaring at them.

* * *

The light didn't fade, but two of the five bulbs went out, leaving behind the fading visual imprints, brilliant and shrinking.

Carol blinked and waited for her eyes to adjust. She then looked down, and much to her amazement, found her body, while still strapped to the operating table, intact. Utterly unharmed, as promised. She looked to her right and saw Charles Xavier. As Cassandra Nova, he was shorter. She was hunched over a tray of surgical tools, slowly removing her bloodied latex gloves. Carol saw that the tailored suit Charles Xavier had worn was a few sizes too large and too long for her, a fact that didn't seem to bother her in the slightest... or perhaps, bothered her less than the streaks of red covering the lapels of the shirt.

"...you're done?" Carol asked, "So soon?"

"Well," she pulled off one glove. A plastic slapping sound echoed in the empty room, "You are an interesting specimen, but I have learned what I needed to know. You'll do... in more ways than one."

"Thank you. Sweet-talk me some more, I might even stop at crippling you, later on."

Cassandra Nova laughed.

"I don't think so." She said.

"Well, 'least you're a shit torturer." Carol said, "I didn't feel a thing."

"I am not a sadist, my dear."

"I'll take your word for it. So." Carol squirmed, imitating settling in as best she could, "What did you find?"

The plastic smack of the latex glove.

"My brother has gone on lengthy safaris after his very early graduation from Harvard." She said, "His true aim was both to look for mutants, whom he thought may be able to live with less fear in the dark continent, as they might have fed the local superstitions. Of course, he also wanted to perform research: he wanted to study animal minds without the constant background noise of people."

"He couldn't go into a zoo after hours?"

"An animal caged is an animal plucked from its natural habitat. It changes their brain chemistry, and thus changes their minds. He wanted to observe them in their native environment, undisturbed, free and pure."

Cassandra Nova leaned on her elbows next to Carol, sporting a sickening smile on her wrinkled, decaying face.

"He discovered that every species on the planet that he could observe telepathically possesses an anthropological certainty, a sense of self that supersedes all other forms of identity. A tiger lives its life with the firm knowledge that it is indeed a tiger, even if it doesn't use the term 'tiger' to describe itself, and so it has no epistemological qualms about it. This is prevalent in every creature that can respond to telepathic communication, so every creature with a brain."

"Is there a point to your story?"

"All I needed to do was to strip you down to nothing to see what you were inside."

"This sounds interesting." Carol smacked her tongue, "Tell me more."

"You are neither human nor mutant, that much you already know. What you may not realize, however, is that it isn't because you've internalized the X-Gene as you have theorized. The truth is much simpler: you belong to a different species altogether. The name of said species, or at least the phonetic approximation of it, is _Kree._ "

"...what?" Carol's voice faltered the moment she realized Cassandra Nova was serious.

"You, Ms. Marvel, are not a native of planet Earth."

* * *

Wanda came down shrouded in a black hoodie, dark wash jeans and combat boots, arms holding herself and face obscured by the raised hood. As soon as she came, Fred bid them goodnight and returned to the cereal box and Toad, knowing when to make himself scarce, simply disappeared.

"...the fuck do you want?" Wanda asked.

"Help." Lance said, "We need your help, Wanda."

"Go fuck yourself." Wanda gave him the finger.

"We're pretty desperate, alright?" Lance said, eliciting an elbow to the ribs from Kitty, "Something's up with the Prof, and we can't figure it out, and you're the only shot we have left."

"Not interested, Tremors." Wanda spat.

"So you're not interested in what's messing with your head, then?" Jean said.

In a flash, Wanda's hands shot up, dragging with it Logan, Kitty and Lance. As they hovered, enveloped in cocoons of red light, voicing their protests, Wanda looked Jean dead in the eye.

"What do you know about it?" she asked.

"First, put my friends down." Jean said, crossing her arms, "Then we'll talk."

"I can choke the life out of them right now, you know." Wanda said, "Twitch of a finger and I _will_ put them down, just not the way you had in mind."

"Better do what she says!" Kitty said, trying to phase her way down and failing.

"Tell me what I wanna know, Red!" Wanda's snapped.

"Fine." Jean said, "Whatever's got Scott and the Professor is causing it."

Wanda eyed Jean suspiciously.

"You look fine." She said.

"I'm on painkillers." Jean replied.

"You're telling me that some Tylenol saved your ass?"

"Try morphine distillate. The professor's recipe. It shuts off my powers."

"So what makes you think I'm not just gonna shoot that up instead..?"

"Don't you wanna know what's powerful enough to drive _you_ up the wall?"

Wanda appeared to consider it. Then, she lowered her hands, sending Logan, Kitty and Lance to the ground. As they groaned in pain and frustration, she went back inside to get her coat. She returned after a moment.

"Guys, I'm going out!" she announced.

"Want me to come with?" Toad appeared almost instantly, as if he had teleported, "It's a dangerous time for a mutant to be alone in the streets, ya know."

Wanda slammed the door closed.

* * *

Rogue paused when her gloved hand slid down, her palm causing a thud sound. Imitation wood, dark finish, spotless but very cheap, almost plastic. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. The door said: **ROOF ACCESS.**

 _Get me the fuck out of here. I want out._

Rogue pushed it open and stepped out onto the roof. She stopped, hand still on the door, and glanced behind her. Through the door frame, she could see the hallway, but the door itself was part of a regular roof access extension. It was much narrower and much shallower.

She looked around. Night had fallen, or maybe morning had never come, and the sky was dotted with stars. All around her, the city rose, its lights painting the dark landscape with specks of warm hues. A breeze rolled in and ran its fingers through her hair.

Rogue's hand slid off the door and it closed, quietly. She blinked. The city surrounded her, spreading out in all directions, far as her eyes could see, a vast metropolis of cold buildings. But after a few seconds, the buildings began to fade as the clearest echo kicked in, bringing a bitter taste to her mouth. The city reminded her of the maze puzzles Scott used to love when he was a child. She didn't have his innate sense of geometry, nor his gift (she had nothing but the tainted memory of him, locked in a room in the hotel under her feet) but it didn't take to see the labyrinth around her.

 _The city is a maze,_ she thought, _they'll never get out._

* * *

Jean assured the others that she would be safe with Wanda, that there was no need to crowd her. Kitty took Lance and shuffled off, Logan opted to stay just outside the door. Just in case.

"Are we going to do this or what?" Wanda snarled at Jean.

"Sorry." Jean said, "Yes. Go on."

"Seriously..."

Wanda stared at the black. Just the sight of it was making her sick. The thought of it was making her nauseous, that this thing would dare _exist_ offended her to the point of barely-contained anger.

"Is this it?" she snarled, "This is your fucking problem?"

"Kurt can't teleport in. Kitty can't phase her way in. Everything else has been tried."

"You fuckheads. Of course you can't go in, it's out of sync. God, no wonder it's getting to me. It's fucking annoying."

"What does that mean?"

"What I said. It's out of sync."

"With what?"

"Reality, dumbass. It's a psionic parlour trick. Not that different from what I can do."

Her hands came out of the pockets of her hoodie. The rings adorning most of them gleamed under the fluorescent lights.

"Just keep your panties on." Wanda said.

She closed her eyes and concentrated. It wasn't magic as they all thought it was, just probability juggling. Anything could happen at any time, she knew, and right now was the time for this sickening affront to vanish.

Jean waited. Wanda's hands were glowing a bright red.

Wanda clenched her teeth. Her thoughts were focused, contained, furiously working over and over again the problem: the barrier. Shift it, open it, make a door. Draw a door, turn the knob, go in, kick that son of a bitch's teeth in. Synchronize it back so that it stops aching. Stop the aching.

Jean waited. Nothing.

" _Come on!"_

Wanda couldn't see anything. There was nothing beyond the black. Nothing survived, nothing breathed, nothing thought, nothing found it in itself to exist. Wanda licked her lips. Her hands took on a more strained pose, her fingers spread out, as wide as they could and straining to go wider.

Nothing different. Nothing beyond the black. Nothing but...

A blinding pain erupted inside Wanda's head, gripping her skull tightly. She couldn't hold back a scream as its fingers, much like piercing tendrils, dug deeper in a rush to wreak havoc. She cradled her head in between her hands and screamed again, trying to expunge the pain. The agony shot down her spine and her knees buckled. Jean kept her from falling, casting a telekinetic net under her, but Wanda wouldn't stop squirming, wouldn't stop screaming.

"What... is this?" Wanda managed through clenched teeth, "The fuck... the fuck is this!?"

The psychic backlash from the Scarlet Witch's anguish made Jean bite down on her lower lip, hard enough to draw blood as she tried to keep standing. The room was spinning, the walls swaying from side to side. Jean tried instinctively to reach into Wanda's mind to scrape out the source, by force if need be – anything to make it stop.

Inside Wanda's mind, there was an all-ecompassing, white-hot light shrouded over everything. There was only the pain, and the light, and the voice, sickly-sweet, emanating from the brilliance:

 **STAY OUT, WITCH.**

* * *

Mnemonic mazes had the advantage of allowing for things like his optic blast to work, or allowing his bodily functions to manifest. While things like pain registered, they only did so in a non-specific way. Cyclops felt glad that physical exertion didn't have the same effect it was supposed to either – despite having jogged at a higher than moderate pace, he wasn't even beginning to get tired.

The city gradually changed as he ran, transitioning from the red-brick buildings to concrete, chrome-plated surfaces and skyscrapers lined with glass. The quiet streets by the lake became a siege of tall buildings on both sides. The eerie emptiness that had marked what Cyclops was calling the suburbia of the mindscape, however, was enduring. There were no cars parked by the sidewalk, the newspaper stands were empty, and there was no sound save for his own footfalls and regular breathing. The street lamps that lined his path left and right looked as dead as the lights that randomly came on and went out in the buildings around him.

 _Just where the fuck am I..?_

The layout was familiar, yet the subtle differences, the angles that weren't right, the placement of doors, of windows (of anything between here and there)... they were all wrong. He couldn't put his finger on it, but his mind knew that he knew this place, he knew it intimately, that he-

Cyclops came to a skidding halt in front of a building. It was just another skyscraper, rising high and piercing the clouds. The front door, too small for a building of such a size, was an art deco thing of merciful symmetry, all brass and glass.

Directly above the door was the name of the building, which, in brass letters of a quirky, angular font, read:

 **PAIGE GUTHRIE  
** **THERAPIST**

"Paige Guthrie..? From the Academy..?"

Cyclops approached carefully, his eyes darting every which way. The glass door was a pull, the simple iron handle cold and heavy. Scott pulled it and went inside. The lobby was plain, the walls lined with wood, leading straight to the reception desk. Scott saw one elevator, to his right, its doors open and waiting. There was music emanating from it, a mournful banjo tune.

The reception desk was manned by a young woman with jet-black, pixie cut hair, dyed blue in certain places. She was naked. She was writing up a storm in a notebook. Her scaled skin was captivating, its sheen visible even to his monochrome vision.

"Stacy X..?" Cyclops muttered.

Her eyes, dark brown and intensely focused, darted up.

"Well, hello there, handsome. Y'here to see Paige?" Stacy sized him up, getting a good look in the process, "Say, do I know you? Did you take me home or some other place and then did I forgot your name? 'cause I remember your taste..." she licked her lips.

"What does Paige do, exactly?" Cyclops asked, his eyes fixed onto hers as Stacy leaned back.

"This is a place where people come to get her help to over their weaknesses. Patch up their wounds, come out stronger, y'know. She helps them be made of sterner stuff. Are you sure we haven't fucked before?"

"Positive." Cyclops thought about it, "Say, you wouldn't happen to know anyone else in the city, would you?"

Stacy arched her back.

"Why?" she asked, moaning contentedly.

"'cause I wanna know." Cyclops said.

"What's in it for me?"

"I'll make it worth your while."

"Promises, promises."

"At least _I_ can deliver."

"Now I see why she likes you." Stacy said with a wink.

"She?"

"The Rogue."

Cyclops tried to bite down on the sudden surge of excitement.

"So you _do_ know someone else."

"Puh-leeze, that doesn't even count. _Everybody_ knows the Rogue."

"How do you know her?"

"Honey, if I didn't have this job, I would've _been_ the Rogue."

Cyclops took a deep breath.

"You sure we haven't met?" Stacy asked again.

"Absolutely." Cyclops replied, "So, is Paige available for a walk-in? Like, right now?"

"She's with someone. You're welcome to wait..." she added suggestively, her hands briefly brushing over her breasts, moving them ever so slightly, "...we can have fun while you do."

"I have somewhere to be." Cyclops said. He turned around and ran out of the building. The emptiness of the street was a comfort.

* * *

"Beautiful, isn't it?"

Rogue turned to see Scott standing there, leaning against the wall. Even the outfit, the black blazer, the white shirt, the jeans, the Chuck Taylors – she had helped pick the whole look out for the semi-formal in the Academy of Tomorrow that they had never attended.

"A graveyard of stars." He went on, one finger pointing up. Rogue followed his lead and saw that the sky above was pitch-black now. "They all fell and got stuck in windowpanes. Got trapped in empty rooms. And now they blink, hoping someone will see it, and put them out of their misery."

"So Ah'm guessin we ain't in Kansas."

"No. We're not."

"Then who the _fuck'_ re you?" Rogue snapped, "You're not him, and you're not me, you're not an echo... but ya look like him, ya talk like him, ya feel like him, ya even smell like him! Who are you?"

"I am whoever you need me to be, whatever you want me to be."

"Fine. Tell me this, then: what is this place? Wait, lemme guess – wherever Ah want it to be, right?"

"...it goes a bit deeper than that."

"Know what? 'think Ah'll just see that for mahself."

Scott stepped between Rogue and the door just as she started towards it.

"Why would you want to be out there with them?"

"Who're _they_?"

"The echoes."

Rogue laughed.

"Looks like you're the only echo Ah've got, and that's 'cause Ah'm fucked up enough ta keep bringin you here."

Rogue closed the distance and stood right in front of him, looking into the glowing, red slit – the sun in his eyes, held behind a safety screen.

Something clicked in her head.

"Ah'm _keepin_ you here. You're mah prisoner." She confessed.

"I'm free to go wherever I want. I stay here because I want to."

"Make me believe it."

Scott's left arm went back and as he stepped aside, he pulled the roof access door open, revealing the impossible hallway. Rogue took his invitation. She stopped with one foot on the other side.

"Is the suite your cell?" she asked.

"No." he said, "It's yours."

Rogue stepped into the hallway and the door closed behind her.


	7. Element 3: Stagnation

" **Untouchable"**

 **Chapter Six  
"Element 3: Stagnation"**

 **(und obwohl ich längst akzeptiert habe, einer von ihnen zu sein)**

The hotel had no elevators, which directed Rogue towards the stairs. The staircase wasn't outside the hallways, she found, but was instead a direct extension of them, carrying the same patterned carpeting down for floors and floors and floors. She descended without hurry, her steps softly scraping the ground, the sound of it muffled further by the walls. As she went down, she saw that there were no doors on any of the floors but the top one. All those below were simple, dead-end hallways that stretched out on both sides of the stairs.

One by one, identical floors with no true purpose but to create the penthouse suite went by.

 _What is this place anyway? I know what the suite is, but not why there's a whole hotel with no rooms under it. Looking at how the roof access works, I'm going to say this place doesn't follow the rules. So why is-_

Rogue got to the floor, made the turn, and that was when a variation popped on her peripheral vision. She stopped two steps down.

 _Wait. What was that?_

Rogue got back up to the floor and peered down the corridor to her right. Sure enough, at the very end of it, there was a door. She approached it, glancing behind her to see if there was another one down the hall. There wasn't.

It was the same as the door of the penthouse suite, complete with the brass plaque carrying a name, etched into it in black:

 **ANNA MARIE**

"What..?"

Rogue grabbed the door knob. She took a deep breath and stepped into her own room.

The cold night wind hit her hard, bleeding in through the open wound that was supposed to have been the outer wall. Rogue saw that it was framed by yellow tape, and that the wind was gently moving heavy, thick strips of nylon construction curtains. There was the smell of concrete dust and power tools, and true to form, she spied a power drill lying on the ground, forgotten. The walls were more or less finished, but there was no wallpaper; just the naked, cold, grey concrete. There was no carpeting under her boots, but she could see tiles of hard wood flooring expanding from the entrance.

There was a single bed, made, complete with pure white sheets, smack in the middle of the unfinished room. Much to Rogue's surprise, there was somebody sleeping there. The sheets were moving ever-so-slightly with her every breath.

* * *

Running through the streets, Cyclops glanced around for signs of life. Paige Guthrie's office was one thing, but by itself, it didn't say all that much about-

 **X FACTOR INVESTIGATIONS  
** **JAIMIE MADROX**

Cyclops came to a skidding halt. Having counted the city blocks, or rather just the streets, he knew that he was a good distance from Paige's building. He decided against going in.

Two blocks later, on both sides of the street.

 **HANK MCCOY'S VINTAGE BOOKS**

 _What..?_

 **ORORO MONROE: MOTHER NATURE  
** **HOMEOPATHIC TREATMENTS**

The latter sign also had a stylized portrait of Storm encircled by a floral frame.

 _A home for every soul and every soul in their homes,_ Scott thought. _But then, I recognize this place. I know who these people are, why they're here._

" _I could've been the Rogue",_ Stacy had said.

 _Because when she touched you, you wanted to be. You're the echo, and that means I'm..._

Scott's brow creased. His steps slowed to a walk.

 _...that means I'm inside Rogue's mind. Either that, or I'm an echo myself, and I'm vivid enough that I don't know it._

He remembered the other echo, Wolverine-by-Rogue. How he was wasting away, trying desperately to survive, to find another echo to feed on.

 _But I'm not like that. So does that mean I'm me? I mean, I feel like me. Am I?_

He looked around. He was in the heart of the city. The buildings that brickworked it into existence were all around him. Some were marked, others were anonymous. The seemingly massive sprawl was, he assumed, what the inside of Rogue's head looked like, then.

 _I don't think it matters. I'm here anyway._

As exciting the prospect of actually seeing what the inside of his girlfriend's mind was, the omnipresence of the others did more than just unnerve him. A little voice in Cyclops' head kept telling him that this, the city, what he was trying to navigate, was how Charles had helped her. How he had managed to suppress the echoes: an appeal to the conscience of every echo, a granting of their wishes. Hank McCoy's often repeated desire to find more time to read. Done, with a wave of the telepathic wand.

 _A home for every soul and every soul in their homes._

This would mean that he would get no guidance. The echoes would all know only what they themselves knew, which meant that nobody would know the city, except for the Rogue's existence in it. Cyclops started up once again, continuing down the avenue, thinking that moving forward, or in any direction, was better than standing still. If he knew Charles, and that he did, there would be a logic to the very loose amalgamation of New York he was running across.

There would be a place to be. He had to keep moving.

He started counting the intersections. One block, two blocks, three blocks, four.

Eight, nine.

Ten.

Eleven, twelve, and how did that nursery rhyme... go...

Wait. Full stop.

"What the..?"

Not only would he recognize those doors, right down to the most minute of wavy lines on the familiar shade of wood, but they looked wildly out of place, embedded onto the side of one of the tallest skyscrapers her had seen there so far. The entire structure was concrete, chrome and glass, ending in the double doors he had gone through countless times over the years.

Cyclops clicked his com-link.

"This is Cyclops, anyone copy?" static. He sighed, "Just in case someone does... I think I've located the professor. I repeat, I think I've located the professor... or something like him, anyway. If you copy, try to get to me before I leave this location. The channel is open."

* * *

The hospital had been abandoned, or at least, that was the feeling Carol got from it. It didn't look anything like a scene out of an apocalyptic movie; rather, it was tidied up and closed completely for some holiday, and nobody had bothered to show up when it was over. Carol pushed the door open for Cassandra Nova, who was hunched over, walking with a cane she had taken from one of the recovery rooms. Charles Xavier's clothes gave her the appearance of having shrunk considerably in the blink of an eye, but she didn't seem to mind. She had discarded the jacket before untying Carol, and still kept her most prominent accessory: her sickening smile. A curling of the lips, a humming giggle under eyes like slits, with a glint of malevolent intelligence smiling in them.

Presently, they had left the surgery wing, and were passing the trauma units.

"What is this place?" Carol asked, avoiding the actual questions that she wanted answered.

"A place of healing, for most." Cassandra Nova said, "It was where they stayed after she almost killed them both."

"She?"

"Rogue."

Carol raised an eyebrow.

"What does she have to do with anything right now?"

"Everything."

"How did you clear out the hospital?"

"I did not. This isn't the actual building. This is her _memory_ of the building, the gaps, places she wouldn'tve seen, having been filled in by my brother as a part of the grander scheme."

Carol pushed another door and held it open. Cassandra Nova passed with a curtsy nod.

"Is _that_ why it's so empty?" Carol asked, letting the door swing back.

"As far as she was concerned, there was only him and her. It is one of the more interesting places here. Well, one of two. And, I have to say, you are not very good at hiding behind small talk."

"Maybe I don't trust you."

"Very well."

"Tell me anyway."

"You are a sleeper agent. Your programming is exquisite, a work of art. Fascinating... and infuriating. It is not mental conditioning. The Kree, from what I could take from your unconscious mind, are humanoids, but cannot pass for human. You were designed to appear completely human. Furthermore, the programming is not in your mind, it is hard-coded into your genes. You have wondered why your bloodwork never yielded anything but a baseline result. It is because your physiology was built around a baseline human."

"How?"

"That, I do not know, but I would love to learn."

"Well..." Carol tried to keep her voice from quivering, "...what's my mission, then? If I'm a sleeper agent, what do I do when I wake up?"

"Your mission is to live as a human, or, in your case, a mutant. You will passively record everything around you, and experience a full lifespan. Of course, it is no accident that you are a member of the US Air Force – an aircraft pilot, a soldier, can go anywhere, see things most others wouldn't. It has nothing to do with assessing military strength. Earth does not seem to be of particular interest to the Kree."

"But why tell me all of this? Even if I believed you, which I fucking don't, just so we're clear..."

"You have no stake in the mutant cause." Cassandra Nova said, making a left turn and entering the hallway leading up to the front desk, "This isn't your fight. You are not a mutant. That you were persecuted as one notwithstanding, of course."

"Like hell I don't. Alien or not, I lost the one thing that mattered the most to me over this. I don't need an X-Gene to know my rights from my wrongs."

Cassandra Nova chuckled. She said nothing further. Carol forced down an urge to grab her by the neck and snap it with the flick of a finger. She kept telling herself that it was Charles Xavier's body, that he was still in there somewhere.

* * *

Cyclops stood there, staring at the Professor. He was wearing a navy blue suit with thin, white pinstripes. A three-piece, paired with light brown, wing-tip shoes. He had his hands in his pants' pockets and seemed to be lost in the view through his window. Cyclops knew that there should've been nothing but the city outside the window, but the Institute's massive lawn was there. It was a bright, sunny morning, despite the night outside.

"You know, people expect me to miss running, or taking a walk." Charles said, "Or skipping, or jumping rope, if I ever have, that is. Or even... sitting down after a tiring day. But no. I don't miss any of those things as much as I miss just standing. Taking in a scenery. Feeling the Earth under my feet, feeling its magnetic pull keep me in place as the planet spins and goes around the sun. To stand in the middle of a field of grass, ah..." he sighed deeply, the very sound of it making Cyclops feel a lump in his throat, "The simple pleasure of it."

They stood in silence for a while. Cyclops didn't know how to start. He wasn't sure if this was really Charles, or an echo of him. Having touched him, Rogue would know what he had just heard. The echo, having been given that which it longed for the most, would want to stay right where he was, by the window and staring out into the beautiful Westchester scenery behind his home.

"But since you're here..." Charles said with a gentle smile, "...it's just Cassandra Nova trying to pacify me, isn't it..?"

"Professor..?"

"Hello, Scott." He glanced at the door, standing ajar, showing a strip of the city outside, "I assume we are not actually in my office and that I am not actually standing."

Cyclops shook his head.

"Sorry, no." He said, "I think we're inside Rogue's mind."

"Yes, we should be in the city. That, unfortunately, has an implication that makes things a bit difficult."

"Such as?"

"This _is_ the home of my echo." Charles said, matter-of-factly.

"Yes?"

"Do you see him anywhere?"

Cyclops turned his head to look around, but even as he began to turn his neck, he knew that he hadn't – there had been only one Charles Xavier in the room.

"The most likely explanation is that Cassandra Nova set him loose, in which case he's dead."

"Is there another explanation?"

"Yes. Cassandra Nova could've outright killed him, which brings us to the same conclusion."

Cyclops recalled the shambling nightmare.

"I saw Wolverine... he..." he didn't know how to put it into words.

"The echoes cannot survive in the streets. The city itself takes it as an invasive move and allows for the time limit included in Rogue's primary mutation to consume them completely, whilst, unfortunately, preserving the initial echoes."

"So how do you know that I'm not an echo?" Cyclops blurted out.

"Simple. Were you an echo, you never would've come here." Charles replied, "Each echo is given their own choice of paradise, their own home. If they choose themselves, it satisfies and so _pacifies_ them."

"Is this what you did to help her?"

"The only way to separate her self from the echoes was to ensure that the echoes were convinced that they _were_ selves. If the echoes could be convinced that they were their own, that they were what they wanted to be, I assumed they would not seek dominance. It worked better than I had hoped... at least, until now."

"A home for every soul and every soul in their homes." Cyclops said, "But why pull us here?"

"I have a theory." Charles said, "I'll tell you on the way."

"On the way where?" Cyclops crossed his arms, "You're staying put."

"Come again?"

"You're staying here. I can't have you out there."

"Scott, what-"

"You're where I know I can find you, and so I can reach you. I don't know what Cassandra Nova is planning, but I know that she comes from _you,_ and already has control of your body. I can't risk her taking control of you here, too."

"This is not a negotiation."

"No. It's not." Cyclops said sternly, "So tell me what you theory is."

Charles took the measure of Cyclops, but while his resolve was visible, almost tangible, even... and he also knew that he couldn't open the doors of his prison cell himself.

"Very well." Charles stuck his hands in his pants' pockets, "I think Cassandra Nova wants what every echo here wanted before the city was built: take over Rogue."

"Take over..?"

"As a host. A permanent host."

Cyclops shivered. But even then:

"But that doesn't explain why _we're_ here, or why Ms. Marvel is."

"Actually, I'm not sure Ms. Marvel was a random addition, nor you... nor myself. I don't think anything she does is random, but I don't know what our purpose is. That my echo is dead means that Rogue cannot access my gifts, but-"

"How would she, without touching you?"

Charles raised an eyebrow.

"Scott, you do know that her mutant power classification is not a rank but a range?"

"Her Xavier file?"

"Lambda to Omega. Omega, because I believe she can actually have access to the powers she has absorbed at will, _if_ she could control it."

"But she can't. Isn't that the problem? Hasn't that been the pro..." his voice trailed off as something terrible clicked in his head, "She can't, but _Cassandra Nova_ can. She wants access to her powers."

"Among other things. That is why I want to come with you. I can help."

"No. Because if what you say is true, I need you to be out of the play. I thought I couldn't risk it before, I think I can risk it even less after that. You're staying here."

Cyclops walked towards the door. Charles sighed.

"Scott, you're ignoring the possibility that she can retrieve me from here, herself, whenever she wants, just like you. You are leaving me out in the open as an unclaimed peace that both of you can grasp when needed."

Cyclops put a hand on the door knob.

"I can't keep her away from you, no. But I'm not going to give you to her in a silver platter."

"Do you at least have a plan?"

"If you know where Rogue might be, it would help."

"There is a hotel. It's the absolute center of the sprawl. It's not a structure I erected, it formed by itself when I was building the city. I think it was her mind that made it, but I do not know why she would choose a hotel."

"Don't you?"

Charles thought about it.

"Anonymity. Yes. There is that, and there is the very strange anomaly of Chicago General Hospital."

Memories flashed in Cyclops' head, of her shape curled up next to him in the bed when she couldn't bear to try and make for the sad parody of rest on the chair. Her curled up form, her murmuring, her unseen distress.

"Where we stayed after the accident."

"Those are the only buildings here that I didn't construct. They're hers. She'll be in either of those. The hotel is higher, and if you are looking for a vantage point, I suggest you go there first."

"Thank you." Cyclops said, "And, I'm sorry that I have to put you out of commission. But I'm sure you also understand why I don't exactly trust you with this."

Without waiting for a response, Cyclops went out. The doors shut behind him. He looked around and spotted the tower. The center. The hotel.

* * *

In an unfinished room of the hotel, Rogue finally took a cautious step towards the bed. The nylon curtains billowed gently and her step forward echoed like a gunshot.


	8. Momentum

" _ **Untouchable"**_

 **Chapter Seven  
"Momentum"**

 **(A piece of me still holding onto what is lost and gone)**

Three more steps and she was at the side of the bed. With trembling fingers, she reached out for the sheets. At the last second, she pulled her hand back. There was an emotion that she recognized, and had always recognized to be her own: fear. Fear of what was under the sheets, fear of what she would find in the center of the hotel, in the only other room that mattered. The unfinished room. The transitional room.

She was afraid to see what was under the sheets, breathing steadily. She couldn't see who it was, as the sheets covered the whole body. Rogue took a deep breath.

"Nothin here but what Ah brought in." she told herself, "Nothing here but what Ah got."

Once again, her hand reached for the sheets. She gently grasped the edge, fingers curling on the fabric, fist clenched, and with one, swift move, as if ripping off a band-aid, she threw the covers off.

Her eyes widened.

There, nestled in the heart of the bed, was herself. She was sleeping soundly, her eyes closed, her breathing even. The white streaks in her hair were brilliant, scattered across the pillow with the rest of the strands, a contrast, a beauty mark of sorts. She was wearing a black shirt, dark wash jeans and black Chucks. No gloves, but those studded leather bracelets were there. Black nail polish.

She looked... beautiful, in a way that Rogue knew she, herself, wasn't. In a way that she knew she would never be. The girl she saw in the mirror sometimes, on rare days when looking at her felt like looking at not the whore but the goddess, when something about her seemed alluring. Like the portrait of herself she often saw through Scott's world of red, pinkish streaks framing a face that his internal, unconscious sense of facial symmetry found to be exceedingly up to measure.

Anna Marie. If her grandma's last name was anything to go by, then, Anna Marie Rankin.

In the bed laid the girl that, ever since Caldecott, everyone had expected her to turn out to be – even herself, looking at the strange girl that was her reflection, trying to find out what about the contours of her face or the sound of her voice, without the infinitely complex opinions of all the echoes screaming all at once, was like to others.

Seeing herself felt not like an out-of-body experience so much as finding a complete stranger in her bed.

"So..." Rogue murmured, "You're Anna Marie."

A moment, and the girl's lips curled into a smile, and as laughter started to reverberate in her throat, Rogue's fear turned to dread. She giggled, without parting her lips.

"Am _Aah_ , nahww?" she asked, her drawl exaggerated, her tone openly mocking the question.

Rogue backed away, her shoulders shifting, her guard going up almost by itself as the girl in the bed rose with graceful motions and sat up.

"Why, thaaaankhs, sugah." She said, purring with glee as she stretched, "Ah needed _thaaat_. Ah mean, fuck knows ya don't say that nearly 'nough for a girl to get on by, ya knaaaahw?"

Rogue felt heart racing as the nylon curtains gently billowed in the background. The girl on the bed crossed her legs and stared at Rogue through streaks of white hair.

"Who the fuck are you?" she asked, "'cause ya ain't me."

"And why the fuck not? Ya even know who the fuck y'are? Who the fuck y'are 'sposed ta be?"

"Nobody knows who they are." Rogue said, "Only what they're supposed to be, and Ah am not you. Ah am not supposed to be you."

"Oh that's where you wraaaaaaahnnngg, sugah."

The girl leapt off the bed and twirled around, her movements soft and graceful, like that of a ballerina.

"Take a good, long, hard look at yo'self, lady." She said, "Deep down inside, this is what y'are, and y'know it, too."

"No. You ain't me." Rogue said.

"Ain't I, nahww?"

"Stop it!"

"Stop why?" her voice came out with a distinctively nondescript accent, "Did you ever want to stop? Did you ever stop to think?"

"Ah..."

"Answer me!" she stomped her foot, making Rogue flinch, "Did you ever stop to think that maybe you were unfinished because ya felt it was easier to be the echoes? Why did you keep collecting them like some deranged, obsessed freak who wants a pound of flesh from everyone, wants to take pieces of them home and then act like she can cherry-pick the best bits? Frankenstein desirable? Is that what you want to be? Jigsaw beautiful?"

"Ah'm not beautiful."

"Well, no shit, Sherlock! You little shit-for-brains, do you really think that he," her hand shot up, an accusing forefinger pointed towards the ceiling, "is any better off with you there? Well?"

Rogue was shaking her head. No. No.

"No, it's not..." Rogue started backing away, "But you weren't like this, i-it's not-"

"I-it's not- it's not what? What? It's not what? All that time on the outside, being me, being yourself, what the fuck do you have to show for it all?"

Rogue felt the wall on her back and that was when the girl's arms trapped her in. Their eyes met and Rogue saw the malevolent glint in them: her own despicable gaze, looking back at her with a smile hidden beneath the razor-sharp stare.

"You never figured out who you are, because who you are got lost somewhere and nobody ever found it. Remember what he said? What he sad when he left after what, three months? When you caught him?"

A flash and Gambit's face, the way his red eyes looked when he had been caught right at the gates, bo staff in hand, duffel bag slung over his shoulder. Sorrow in those eyes, a hint of regret – a humanity that she didn't think him capable of harboring. It had taken her a second to understand that the stare, the thousand-yard look held volumes behind it.

"He had you fucking pegged... inside and out." She said, " _Anna Marie is the church girl who puts on her Sunday's best and then makes nice with the congregation. She bakes and does charity. She's a nice girl, but she's not you. The Rogue is so much more. And you've forgotten that. The echoes left you and you forgot that you are the Rogue._ "

His words, repeated, recalled the tone of his voice, that hint of regret again, the sadness at her lost soul. A prayer, even, for what could never be found.

"Because you are not Anna Marie, you see. _I_ am not Anna Marie! I'm what's left of her when Cody Rogers climbed on top of her, put his hands around her throat and squeezed the fucking _name_ out of her! I'm the part of her who told you that I had to dress up in _his_ skin just to get you to keep you from hurting me! Well, guess what, the gloves are off, bitch!"

The punch came out of nowhere. Rogue saw stars as she lost her footing, slid down the bare, concrete wall and fell, her own scream in her ears, following her down to the floor:

" _You never loved me!"_

* * *

Logan watched as Jean dragged Wanda out of the control room. Having to do it manually must have been strange for her, he assumed, she could've made her lighter, at least. But the morphine distillate was doing its job. He knew enough of its scent pouring out of her every pore, and the sweat at the roots of her hair told him that she had about four hours left until she could use her powers again.

Perfect timing, as always.

The phone on the control console went off. Jean stopped where she was. Logan went to get it. He picked it up and put it on speaker.

"Bob's Pizzaria, may I take your order?"

A sigh. Familiar timbre.

" _Logan, it's Nick."_

"Fury." Logan silently mouthed 'S.H.I.E.L.D.' to Jean, "Not a social call, right?"

" _I wish. Listen, we're about... wait, what's the ETA? Right, we're about twenty minutes from the Institute. If you have anything you don't want on the record, get to the cover-up."_

"What? What do you mean you're twenty minutes away? Why are you even coming here?"

" _Whatever's in your basement, it's got a Psi reading of off the fucking charts, and we have a natural curiosity about anything of that caliber. I can't do this off the record, hence the warning."_

"Not the best time, Nick. You're one more thing in this clusterfuck that I-"

" _Logan, I'm the only thing standing between you and a full-scale military op, so which one do you want? The sword or the shield, so to speak?"_

"Alright, _fine_ , come the fuck along, then. We might even end up appreciatin' the help."

" _Alright. Fury out."_

Logan hung up. He sighed and ran a hand through his hair.

"I need a fuckin' beer or seven." He said, "Red, drag her to the Infirmary, wouldja? I gotta wake up the rest of them, it's gonna be a long fuckin' night..."

* * *

The curvature of the reception desk went on for three-quarters of a circle. The waiting area was filled with metal folding chairs, back up against the wall. To their right was the entrance, a revolving door, that would now serve as an exit. It opened, Carol saw, to an empty street. It was night-time outside. If, that is, there was an outside at all.

"Well, guess this is goodbye, Cassandra, or whatever the fuck." Carol said, "It's been awful."

Cassandra Nova waited for her to take a few steps towards the door, and then she spoke:

"There is nothing for you out there, Ms. Marvel. Besides which, where do you think we are?"

"Doesn't matter. I'm going out and-"

Carol's left hand curled into a fist and she punched herself in the jaw. She bit her tongue. The pain registered fully and she tasted the coppery taste of her own blood.

"No. You're not." Cassandra Nova said In fact..."

Cassandra Nova's fingers curled inwards, but not into a fist. She raised them up, elbows bent, like a puppeteer and Carol's arms raised up. Cassandra's hands moved and Carol found herself giving her a full salute.

"You know, my brother had his suspicions about your mind, but had he known the full extent of the truth, I believe he could've found a better use for you than what I intend. He could have paraded you around as proof of an impending alien invasion – a threat on such a scale that nobody in their right mind would disregard the possibility. But no. Of course not."

"What... did you..."

"I used the time we had together to work out how your nervous system actually works, how your neural feedback actually functions. You're very much like dolphins, in some ways. But now, Carol, I have full control of your body. Here, and elsewh-"

All Cassandra Nova saw was red as the full force of an optic blast hit her a fraction of a second before the sound of thick glass shattering fill the room. She flew off her feet and crashed onto the reception desk, limbs flailing, and went over it. Her moan emerged a second before glass crunched under Cyclops' boots when he stepped into the lobby.

* * *

The blows kept coming, unrelenting. Her fury in every punch, every kick, every strike, screaming at herself in the mirror with the purest of confessions: I hate myself. I hate myself. I hate myself.

" _You piece of shit!"_

The Chucks plunged into her stomach, knocking the wind out of her. Trying to breathe, to crawl towards the door, Rogue shifted, squirming, trying to get out from under the most potent anger she had ever known.

"You never cared for me! You never even gave half a fuck whether I would live or die – how does it feel to get skull-fucked by yourself, huh!? How does it feel to feel what you do to me!?"

The next kick shook her skull and rattled her teeth.

"You were supposed to protect me! You were supposed to help me! You were supposed to do everything to learn who I am and then to love me the way you love him, love me like you _should've_ loved me, but what the fuck did you do? Huh? What did you do!? Answer me, you fuck!"

A fistful of hair, pulled, pulling her up. Exposing her neck for her to deliver a chop to it, crushing her windpipe, choking her.

"How does it feel to be choked by yourself every second?" she hissed, "You fuck. You worthless fucking _whore_!"

She threw Rogue to the ground. Rogue tried to suck in air, hands clawing at the bare concrete, trying to get away in vain. She was on top of her, watching her.

Her voice, infectious, echoing slightly in the open space. Wind howling outside.

"What did I _ever_ do to you to make you hate me so much? I gave you everything I had, I kept you safe, I gave you this place, and you just threw me away here, hoping you could be someone else! Always someone else, anyone else, but why not me? Why the fuck not me? _Why don't you want me?_ "

Rogue coughed, spurted, trying to breathe. Getting there, but barely.

"You just learned who I was so that you could gift-wrap me and give me to that fucking freak upstairs!"

Rogue looked up, seeing through the wounds, looking through a curtain of the blood dripping down her brow.

"Oh, what, you think that's not him? You think that's not who he is?"

Anna Marie threw her head back and laughed, the sound echoing in the room, distorted. Still giggling, she crouched down and looked Rogue dead in the eye.

"That's _him_ , you see. Up there, in that suite, that's who he is, deep down. Inside." With two fingers, she tapped on her chest, "Right here, in his heart of hearts that's Scott Summers. You," clenched teeth snarl, "just wanted _me_ so that you could give him something, and maybe then his fucked up could match your fucked up a bit better, if you could pretend that it was all normal a little more. Yeah, that's him, and look what you do to him... look what he does to _you_. You love that there's someone who's fucked up enough to love you the way he does, don't you? Don't you? Come on. Be a dear, huh, be a darling. Fucking answer me. What's the matter, cat got your fucking tongue?"

Something was aching in her chest, where the knot used to be. Somewhere inside of her was an open wound, aching, throbbing with every heart beat. Through the blood and the sweat and the tears, she looked at the face she kissed in the mirror, the cold glass lips come to life, the Whore Goddess, poison tongue and harsh touch – all those cuts, all those scrapes and bruises and fighting for her life in the midst of a protracted lynching attempt, and what for?

"Because you can't deny it." She said, grinning that bloodthirsty grin, that turned on grin, that whorish grin, "Because you know that _I am who you are_. You want the truth of Anna Marie, you want the truth of who you are supposed to be, who you will always be? I know it, because deep down, you know it, too. Here, I'll even whisper it to you, so nobody else will hear it."

She drew close, and Rogue, through the pain, her throbbing head, caught the scent of her – sweat and sex and something unidentifiable, parts of her mixed and triggering an entire array of memories just by her proximity.

* * *

All eyes watched with keen interest every move they made, and Logan, downing his six-pack at record speed and nervously smoking his cigar, wondered if waking them up was a good idea after all. The flipside was that he could have the best back-up a man could ask for, should things go downhill.

It hadn't taken much time, fifteen minutes at the most. Fury, already knowing the exact location of the "off-the-charts" had been, had just asked for any info they had. After a ten-minute debrief and a review of the surveillance footage, Fury had ordered his science teams in. The students had asked all sorts of questions, of course, but one glare from Wolverine, and they had been silenced... more or less.

He didn't particularly feel comfortable in the presence of tech. Wires and cables and strange machines all reminded him of another jumbled mess of a memory, long ago and far away, back to when Nick Fury didn't even have white strands in his hair. All this reminded him too much of that tank wherein he had become what he was now.

Out of habit, he unsheathed his claws, just a tiny bit, just enough to feel the adamantium tear through his skin. The skin closed up after a few moments, trapping the claws in place.

Fluorescent corridor lights, gleaming off of the sharp edge.

He retracted them, still not sure what to do with himself.

Leaning against the wall and slowly chewing into a toothpick was Nick Fury. To Logan, he was acting like this was his day off, like he was in a party with all of his government pals and was waiting for the wife to get him another beer. Logan huffed in annoyance, waiting for them to set up their shit was getting to him.

"So, any contact with X23 lately?" Fury asked.

Logan shot a cross look at him, but then realized that he meant nothing by it. He was making small talk.

"Your small talk's a lot like your shop talk, Fury."

"Can't help that SHIELD is 24/7." Fury said, smiling.

"No contact since Sinister." Logan replied, "She likes it like that."

"Can't say I blame her. How are we on the scanners, people?"

A scientist replied.

"Almost ready, sir. We're initiating scan now."

"This oughta be interesting." Logan said, "If you came all the way here for..."

Excitement behind Logan. The children whispering products of their imagination to each other, silenced by one stern look.

The machines started to hum, small LED lights on their outer shells blinking to indicate certain phases were being passed through. The techies assembled behind the scanners, looking at hand-held screens and wrist-mounted holographic interfaces, constantly mumbling technical specs to one another. Logan caught most of it and worked his training; appropriated some of the terms he didn't know by their grammatical functions and worked out what they meant.

Doing so, he discovered that they didn't measure it via an output-to-input scan, but rather, had resident psychic resonances within them. The machine started to resonate, like a tuning fork adjusting the chord, and report on how much of the resonance matched.

One term caught Logan's particular attention as the coolant systems of the scanners kicked and started to whir. Grey matter density.

Logan's eyes widened as he realized how electronic equipment managed to measure psi. He bent over to Fury's ear.

"You've got actual, live brains in those things, don'tcha?"

"Yes." Fury replied without hesitation, "Yes, we do. How else are we supposed to measure something that's organic by nature?"

Logan clenched her teeth and that was when an alarm began to sound, a split second before the perfectly-pitch modulated sound of the automated security systems flooded the floor:

" _Perimeter breach. Hostiles inbound."_

"Ah fuck me sideways!" Logan bit into his cigar, "What the fuck is it now?"

" _Four hostiles detected. Identifying..."_

"She's fast." Fury commented. He clicked on his com-link earbud, "All units, prepare to..."

" _Sir, we have mutants inbound, they're-"_

The line went dead.

"Unit Alpha, come in! Come in!"

Overhead, the intercom buzzed.

" _Face recognition confirmed. Emma Frost. Sebastian Shaw. Harry Leland. Selene Gallio. Known affiliation: The Academy of Tomorrow."_

"Isn't that the Faculty?" Nick Fury asked.

"Yes, God, fuck it, _fuck it!_ " Logan threw his cigar and turned to the students, arms crossed "Alright, people, this obviously ain't a drill, so follow me to the lockers, get in uniform, and let's get topside and look like we know what we're doin'." He glanced over his shoulder, "Nick, you got this, right? Full assurance nobody will be in more than one piece?"

"I'll do what I can."

"Yeah, see that you do, or my full assurance that you won't be in more than one piece goes with yours."

* * *

"Ms. Marvel, are you okay?" Cyclops asked, stepping to her side and looking her up and down. She looked unharmed. For now. He realized that he had had no way of keeping time, and his runaround in the city felt like it had taken days.

"Call me Carol, and yes, I'm alright. How did you-"

"Short version, since we don't have the time: we're in Rogue's mind."

"I know that."

"Good, that helps a lot. Our powers still work. Far as our brains are concerned, this is real and happ-"

Carol's hand curled into a fist and jerked upwards, catching Cyclops square in the face. The visor shattered and all he could feel before his consciousness slipped further down into the black was his nose breaking. His limp body flew out the window and landed on the pavement outside, rolled twice and stopped in an obscene pose.

"Weird little gift of his actually hurt." Cassandra Nova intoned, her voice nasal, "I should've done something about that, but pain is a necessary response sometimes."

Carol shook. She was straining against it, but it was as if weights that even she could not shift were tied to her limbs. She stared daggers at Cassandra Nova who came shambling around the reception desk, one hand on her back, walking as if she needed a cane.

"He's not dead." She said, "Stop worrying. Your stress-response is a touch more potent than humans'."

"Let me move and you'll see what my stress-response is like, you old _cunt_."

"Do you want me to arrest your larynx, so you can't talk at all? Language, young lady."

"Fuck you."

"Much obliged, but my preferences differ from yours, now."

Cassandra Nova shuffled on towards the broken window, the glass crunching under her shoes. She stood there, looking at the unconscious form of Cyclops.

"I could not have done it better myself." She said, "Ms. Marvel, take him. There's one more person we need to collect before the stage is set."

Carol tried to speak, but when she opened her mouth, no sound came out. She struggled, feeling her throat strain against whatever was arresting her voice, to no avail. She glared daggers at Cassandra Nova, who only smiled her wrinkled smile and gestured for her to come closer.

* * *

The cold wind blowing through the nylon curtains chilled her to the bone. The hard ground was stained with her blood, the blood that she herself had spilled many times just to see the girl who had beaten her down, just to see her face, just to feel that she was there.

Face-to-face, she seemed like she was so much more than what Rogue had thought she was. Cruel. Ruthless. Cold.

Her eyes that kept the storm, wild and raging. The glimmer in her eye. That wanderlust and lack of belonging, that complete detachment from the world. The eyes that had beheld the heart of America, the road salt Möbius strip of asphalt and white lines, the eyes that had looked into the soul of him to see love, nothing but love.

Ever since Apocalypse. Even his name, a joke: "after I cover." Revelation.

Her revelation was here. Her revelation was now, whispering to her the promised truth, the whole wretched truth and nothing but the ugly, naked truth:

"Anna Marie died she was given to your grandma like the piece of unwanted trash that she was. She was traded in for some good money like a second-hand record nobody wanted to hear. You are just the walking corpse of a girl nobody knew and nobody remembers. That's right: _Anna Marie is dead and you are where she's buried."_

Something clicked in Rogue's head. Sound of a hammer cocking back, the firing mechanism aligning, ready to ignite the gunpowder. She shifted suddenly, too quick for Anna Marie to follow, pushed the ground and stood up. Anna Marie had managed to put her guard halfway up when the Rogue came onto her, leaping up and throwing a punch that broke her nose. They both felt the pain of it, and Rogue understood that every blow she had just felt, Anna Marie had too.

 _Because I made you. Out of everything they tried to make me, I made_ you _, you ungrateful bitch. I saved you. You are mine to lose, to give away, to do whatever with. You are all mine._

Only the Rogue had the bruises and the scars, and she was pristine, untouched. Untouched and untouchable. Standing there like the Goddess that she wasn't, the beautiful she would never be, the wanted, the desired, the actual... not the potter, but the potter's clay.

 _Hath not the potter power over clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honor and another unto dishonor?_

With a desperate, furious scream, Rogue grabbed Anna Marie by the neck and pushed her, and pushed her, and pushed her until her heels slid over the edge. When her feet slid onto the void, a smile crept onto her face, and a second before Rogue's hands gave her that final push, she whispered a whisper, louder than a bomb falling:

"But you'll love me in the end."

Rogue let go and she fell through the nylon curtains and down into the heart of the night, her delighted laughter following her all the way down.


	9. War On A Meadow

" _ **Untouchable"**_

 **Chapter Eight  
"War On a Meadow"**

 **(Defaced by war to ruin my shelter)**

Despite everything else, despite the corpse tucked underneath his desk, crumpled up in an obscene, cubic rendition of itself, Charles couldn't help but find it very difficult to look away from the scene. He knew, logically, that it wasn't really there, that he was actually slumped in his wheelchair in the Danger Room, unconscious. But here, standing there, just standing... dear Lord was it the recurring dream of his life. His ability allowed him to be lucid during his dreams, and this in-between, this parody of a dream within a dream afforded him that, but took away his control.

It was beautiful, to be able to stand perfectly still and let the world flow through him.

The lawn, constructed, no doubt, from his own memory, was freshly cut and he could almost smell the grass. He could...

The doors of his office were smashed open, a fist-sized chunk of wood flew and hit him in the back. The illusion of bliss shattered, Charles, hands still in his pockets, turned to see Carol marching towards him.

"Carol?"

Without a word, Carol sunk her fingers into his desk, digits diving into the wood, lifted it and threw it away The corpse underneath it, three-piece suit wrinkled and head twisted all the way around unfurled then, limbs gently extending from the ball it had curled into. The light from the outside world reflected off of the smooth, bald head.

"Carol, what-"

A split second before Carol's fist knocked him out, Charles caught a glimpse of Cassandra Nova, dressed in a hospital gown, grinning madly.

* * *

"Is this what passes for security these days?"

Emma Frost glared at Harry Leland. His curly, ginger hair was gleaming under the spotlights of the Institute's front-line defenses, all crushed under the weight of their own components, smoldering pieces of junk around them. He was grinning widely.

"If you believe their defense consisted only of these little toys, then you're a fool." She said, "The true defense of this Institute is inside, and I think you've just woken them up."

"I don't think they'll be any trouble." Sebastian Shaw intoned, sliding out of his shirt and bearing his chiseled chest, "Not against us, at any rate."

"This is too easy." Selene said, brushing her jet-black hair back with a latex gloved hand, "That, I agree with."

"Why, thank you." Harry mock-curtsied.

"Can we please get on with it?" Sebastian Shaw said, flexing, trying to loosen up, "We have a bit of a ground to cover before we reach where we need to be, and-"

A banshee wail tore through the night, shaking loose the last pieces of the defensive equipment around the four, and heating up the air molecules in between. Emma Frost, Selene, Harry cupped their hands over their ears and tried to sand their ground as their eardrums strained to breaking point, while Sebastian stood directly in front of Banshee with open arms.

"Sonic waves!" he said, "Impressive! Come on, you can do a bit better than that, why not match your pitch to the windows?"

Fist-sized chunks of ice flew out from behind Sean Cassidy, and a few of them struck Sebastian square in the chest, who seemed invigorated, if nothing else. One other managed to catch Selene squarely in the head and knocked her out. Emma Frost managed to turn herself completely into diamond a split second before the projectiles found her. Having shut the sound out, she rushed headlong ahead, bypassing Sebastian and chuckling at the Irish kid's determination: he was actually walking towards the man with his jaw hanging obscenely open, wave after wave of sonic blasts washing over him.

"Not so fast, Frost!"

Emma came to a screeching halt and went under Wolverine's high swipe, the claws barely even scratching her. Logan spun, following her, bearing down on her with speed and instinct – although he was shorter than her, he was bigger and so he came, adamantium claws shining, reminding her that diamonds, while forever, were no match for what he had.

Shadowcat emerged from the ground, memory-foam polymer earplugs in place and grabbed hold of a stirring Selene. Harry Leland turned, hand pointing towards her, and Kitty felt herself, still up to her waist in soil, growing denser and denser. Her eyes widened and she struggled, trying to get topside before she phased with the dirt still inside the layers of her body.

With a resounding _BAMF!_ Nightcrawler wrapped himself around Harry's plump body, and before the latter could react, they vanished in a puff of smoke. Shadowcat felt as if a weight has been lifted from her shoulders. She felt lighter and lighter and lighter until she realized that the world was shifting incline, sliding right, and the ground wasn't that intangible soft anymore, it was comfortable.

The last thing she saw before losing consciousness was a black lipstick smile stretched over pearly whites.

* * *

Wanda opened her eyes and leaped up at the same time, dragging Jean by the arm. Jean let out a yelp as the reality warper swung her legs off the bed and her boots found the linoleum ground. Jean tried to balance herself, bent backwards awkwardly, and put a hand on her shoulder while she steadied herself.

"What, _ow!_ Wanda, my hair-"

"Fuck your hair, don't you sense that!?"

"...you know I can't!"

"Since you're fucking useless right now?" Wanda crouched down and retrieved her boots, "Alright. I'll tell ya."

Wanda's hand withdrew. Jean straightened her hair out and frowned at her. She hated being out of commission, especially at a time like this. Between that thing in the basement, the witch here, S.H.I.E.L.D. in the hallway and whatever was going on topside, she felt like she was better off just not being there.

"There's someone with a psychic ability upstairs. Between that fucking thing in the basement and _that_ , I'm going for the one I can actually deal with."

"Are you sure you want to go up there?"

"Positive." Wanda cracked her knuckles, "You can make yourself useful - call my idiot brother. Tell him to get his ass down here, _posthaste_."

* * *

The wind caressed her bare scalp as Cassandra Nova glided through the air, above the buildings and marveled at the architecture of the mind. Each building confirmed to some blueprint that hadn't been seen or drawn up by an actual architect, but far as she could see, they were all actual structures with actual character and stability. From the images she had pulled from her brother's long-term memory, Cassandra Nova could see that the city in the mindscape was an amalgamation of several different cities, and it served the wonderful purpose of variety.

She glanced at the two people hanging from Ms. Marvel's free hand. Her brother, of course, ever the three-piece snob and the leverage. There was no reason to think of Scott Summers as anything other than the latter also, as the boy's purpose in all this had been made clear to her the moment the Rogue's affections for him had been.

Out of the corner of her eye, Cassandra Nova saw movement. Someone falling from the top of the hotel they were headed to, laughing all the way down. She saw the fall traced in brilliant light, a psychic umbilical cord that tied her to whoever was standing on the ledge she had fallen from, and from the way the air rippled around her, Cassandra Nova knew that she hadn't been just an echo trapped in the endless lie of limitless bliss that kept the others at bay.

No, she had been something else.

"The hotel." Cassandra Nova said, to Ms. Marvel,"Take us to the roof."

* * *

Rogue stood, panting, at the very edge, her toes right on the line. The eerie laughter, full of mad glee, was still ringing in the air, the after-echo of an after-echo, far and wee, but present and heavy. Panting, she glanced down, ears perked, waiting for the sound of the impact, of the world coming down. The dull sound of everything ending, the flat line bleep that stretched onto eternity. The last gavel strike of the final judgment on her existence.

It never came.

How many times had she stared into her own eyes in the mirror, trying to see this girl everyone seemed to think lived behind them? How many times had she stood on subway tracks, on the street, in the bathroom, in the Danger Room, tempted, pondering, afraid and alone, trying to discern if she was actually at the line and if she had to actually decide?

How many times had she wished her dead and gone?

What had she promised him, back in the Academy of Tomorrow, desperate just to drown?

 _It'll be like I never happened._

Rogue stood in the scene of her own suicide, in the room that had replaced the security of the white one with exposure, with herself. The only thing that she had feared and hated and loved and despised and wanted to kill and wanted to be and was too much and was never enough.

Never hers, always hers because never her and always her, the girl in the mirror, the girl in Scott's head, the girl everybody knew and nobody knew, herself, that she had just wanted dead and gone so she could be someone else, anyone else – be just who she wanted to be.

"And how does it feel?"

His voice. His goddamn voice. The echo – no. Not the echo. Not the potter but the potter's clay. Not now. Not fucking now, just – no.

"This is what you wanted all along." He said.

"Not like this." Rogue said, her breath slowing, "No, not like this."

"Now, you'll never know her." He said, and she could hear him smirk, "Now you can ruminate to your heart's content that you never will."

"Ya think that's what Ah wanted, Scott? Ah wanted her... to be what Ah wanted her to be. Not this. Not what Ah knew she was."

His arms wrapped around her and his scent pulled her in. She nestled against him, feeling his breath on her neck, his strength surrounding her.

"Forget her." He said, "Be who you want to be."

"Ah can't escape her. She's all Ah ever had... wanted to have."

"Is she, now? And what about me? What am I?"

"You... are all Ah have left."

She turned, as if to face him, but he was gone. The cold wind sweeping through the room howled gently in her ear, and Rogue found herself alone in the middle of the empty space.

"Scott..?"

A booming voice answered her, instead.

 _He's waiting for you on the roof, as is everything else._

* * *

The scent of fire and brimstone filled the air as Nighcrawler emerged, still wrapped around Harry Leland, two miles east of the Institute, twenty feet from the ground.

"You little-"

"Ach, nein, mein freund, ve are still going!"

Nightcrawler held Harry tightly and felt every muscle in his body flex as he teleported... but couldn't. The strain fell on him like a ton of bricks as they both began to fall. Nightcrawler gripped him tighter, muscles straining, and tried again.

"Nngh!" a moan escaped his lips as they sped up, at full free-fall.

"Hard to teleport wrapped around a mass a hundred times your own, isn't it?" Harry cackled, "Brace for impact, kid!"

Nightcrawler let him go, leaping up and _BAMF!_ teleported a few feet away and onto the ground. He watched as Harry, smiling, floated gently down, light as a feather, swaying in the evening breeze.

"Ach, never mind."

Nightcrawler teleported back. Harry landed softly and straightened himself out. The one downside was that he now had to leg it back to the Institute.

* * *

Sebastian Shaw wondered very briefly when Banshee, or the multiple Jamie Madroxes pounding away at him would realize that he wasn't nigh-invulnerable like they, and everyone else under the sun, always assumed, but one more step and that awful racket would stop, because he would smash that Irish fucker's face right in.

A sonic boom echoed in the distance. Sebastian took a step, reached forward and stuck his fingers into Banshee's mouth, silencing him. He swatted away at a Madrox, breaking his neck and causing him to vanish into thin air. Upon seeing this, the other Madroxes retreated.

Emma Frost dodged the flash of claws just in time to see a mass of flesh catapulted towards Sebastian Shaw, which he countered by turning and raising both hands, only to be buried into the mass of soft, flabby flesh. Wolverine's claws flashed, and she dodged.

Lightning struck Emma Frost's back, crackling across the diamond surface of her skin. Angered, she dodged Wolverine's claws, spun around and landed a solid punch into his side that penetrated the skin. She sunk her fingers into the first mass of flesh, gripped and squeezed. Wolverine let out an animalistic howl as his kidney exploded inside his body.

"Tooslow!"

Quicksilver launched towards Emma Frost while Sebastian Shaw, trying to match the Blob's mass with his strength – the meat bearing down on him had sunk him up to his knees and he was going deeper still. It wasn't feeding him, but, as he screamed at the smug grin on Blob's face, siphoning off his built-up strength as the mass of flesh enveloping him did not give him anything, but it took everything just to keep himself afloat.

Quicksilver slowed down halfway through, his steps sluggish, and he tripped over his own feet. He fell onto the ground, limbs flailing, rolled and came to a standstill.

Selene laughed, ecstatic. The speedster's life force was potent. It rushed through her like speed on speed, like a super-stimulant. She reached out further and caught Jamie Madrox as he tried to divide himself further, pulled his duplicates back, one by one, until only the child remained. She pursed her lips – pity, his duplicates did not have life-forces of their...

A flash of red and the Black Queen found herself on her knees, vomiting up the last of her admittedly luxurious lunch. Dry heaving, she glanced around to see Wanda, at the heart of red, pulsing energy, hands contorted to the shape of the hex, reality at her fingertips.

"That's my brother, you bitch!" Wanda shouted as she held up her hands. Selene rolled, stood and put her guard up. She took the hit, pure building-block energy, the bare bones of reality, and sucked it down to replace what she had just lost. Wanda broke into a run and cast another hex, glowing red, that Selene didn't hesitate to swallow.

Selene expected the next hex, the next supercharged wave of super-pure energy, but met a fist full of silver and pewter rings instead. The punch rattled her, but she returned the blow in kind, and before they knew it, they had dispensed of everything but their own fists.

Wolverine saw the world get blurrier and blurrier as blood lost slipped his conscience away from him, his wound not healing quick enough to help him keep his eyes open. He saw the Blob bury Sebastian Shaw completely into the ground and grin – the Immovable Object did have its uses, once moved.

He looked around for Emma Frost. The last thing he saw was her shiny, diamond body strutting up the front steps as Storm dropped like a stone from above. Everything went black after that.

* * *

Jean watched through the only available camera as the X-Men held back the would-be intruders. Around her, the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents were moving, chit-chat filling the air, and for once she was glad not to have her telepathy pulling in stray thoughts.

The scent of cigarettes and Nick Fury's presence alerted her. She turned to see him staring at the monitor, observing the scene.

"They're putting up a good fight. I bet the Hellfire Club wasn't expecting to be held up by a bunch of teenagers."

"The Hellfire Club?"

"Classified."

"I suggest you declassify it," Jean said, "now."

Nick Fury shot her a look, and then, shrugged. He knew that, as a telepath, she could read his mind and wrench it out... eventually.

"It's their official designation, if you can believe that. The senior faculty of the Academy of Tomorrow is all that's left of what used to be an exclusive club for adventurous aristocrats."

"I think they're here for what's in there." Jean cocked her head in the direction of the techies.

"About that – what _is_ in there?"

"It's kind of hard to explain." Jean said, sighing as she saw Emma Frost down Storm with what she recognized as a psychic blast – expressed in a momentary lapse in the feed, "But, it is, far as we know, Cassandra Nova, the professor's twin sister. That," Jean pointed the featureless void covering the Danger Room, "is her handiwork. Far as I know."

Jean watched as Nick Fury's expression changed from interest to worry.

"Shit." He said, "Somebody in intelligence just got themselves fired. This is exactly what the kind of thing I'm paying them to know." He sighed and turned to the techies, "People!" he clapped his hands, turning the heads of every tech assembled in the hallway, "Pack it up!"

"But sir, we-" a techie attempted to object.

"I said, pack up! Find a room, have a sit-down. Take thirty, take whatever until the chaos up there dies down, one way or another."

As they set to it, Fury stomped out his cigarette.

"You, Ms. Grey. You will now sit down and debrief me, quick as you can, on Cassandra Nova."

"Can I stand?"

"On your own time."

* * *

Ms. Marvel drew a graceful arc in the air, pulling her passengers through. She straightened out when she reached the peak of her trajectory, slowed down and hovered own gently, pulled by Cassandra Nova's invisible puppet strings. Wanting desperately to let her fall, she gently lowered herself, and set both Cassandra Nova and Charles Xavier down. Then, she grabbed Cyclops and floated up and away from the roof.

Cassandra Nova shambled over to Charles and crouched down with great difficulty. The downside of realistic mindscapes was that the body that she would've worn down to a corpse would only hold as a barely-functional mess, crippled, but still only a vessel. It was leagues beyond surviving only as a stray thought in the back of his unconscious mind, like a Titanic survivor clinging to the iceberg. Decade after decade of catching stray thoughts to slither into and suck out psionic energy from had led to this poor manifestation, but it was better than no manifestation at all, and would serve her interests.

She poked and prodded him, and he stirred, but didn't regain his "consciousness." Cassandra Nova rolled her eyes. Typical. REM sleep always did come easy to him.

The roof access door opened. Carol felt the strings tighten, and she saw her hands maneuver his head to a position between them so that she could... her eyes widened as she understood that she could snap his neck with one swift move, if she -or rather, that ice-cold hag down there- wished.


	10. Element 4: Angst

" _ **Untouchable"**_

 **Chapter Nine  
"Element 4: Angst"**

 **(Schade, denn ich hätte dir so gern einmal richtig zugehört)**

The cold air and the open night sky greeted her as Rogue stepped out, something stirring inside her. The sight burned into her eyes was her own mad smile as she fell, the brilliant light following her through the fall. The death of a dead girl. Standing there, all she could actually process was that she would never get out of the hotel.

He had been right. This was her prison. She knew now, as she stood before them that she had built this place, brick by brick, with her ruminations, and like an architect that had built herself behind a wall, she would never escape her own creation.

Both the potter and the potter's clay.

She blinked and that was when she saw Ms. Marvel, hovering in the air, just beyond the roof, and in her hands, the unconscious form of Scott Summers.

"Scott..?"

"Yes, that is the real Scott Summers." Cassandra Nova croaked. Rogue noticed then that she was standing right next to Charles, who was blinking rapidly, trying to shake loose the stupor.

"Rogue! She..." Ms. Marvel began, but her jaw clenched shut, the strings pulling, and her grip on Scott tightened.

"What..." Rogue's head, still reeling in from what had transpired, couldn't process the bizarre scene in front of her, "What is this..?"

"Ah." Cassandra Nova smiled, her face melting into a thousand wrinkles, "It's all very simple. I pulled you all here, because you have something that I want very, very much, Rogue."

"Don't listen to her, Anna Marie." Charles said, sitting up. He tried to move his legs. They wouldn't budge. He glared at Cassandra Nova, whom, without even noticing, could be the only reason for that.

The name stirred inside her, a knot in her chest.

"Tell me." She said.

"A body." Cassandra Nova crooned, "A physical form. A vessel that won't rot and decay under the psychic strain of my existence, a host shell that can accommodate me to the fullest. _Yours_."

A laughter, arrested in Rogue's throat, still cackled its way up and escaped through her lips. She felt the entire night roll off her shoulders as she threw her head back and laughed, the sound making Carol shiver through the tightly-wound puppet strings arresting every muscle.

"Mah body? That's it? Ya want mah _body_?"

"Anna Marie, don't listen to her!" Charles called out, trying to reach out with his mind. He found a barrier around her, a solid obstacle to his telepathy that he read only as profound, internal distress. Beneath the calm, even tired exterior, he saw a swirling mass of chaos, calm and slowly simmering.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

"I'm glad you think so. You see, Rogue, your ability ensures that I can exist inside you indefinitely. All you have to do is to let me in."

"Why don't ya just take it?" Rogue asked, "That's what the other echoes woulda done."

"That may be so, but I can't have the host ego-self fighting me for survival all the time. The strain would drive you insane, and me alongside. No. This is different."

"Anna-"

"Shut up, Charles." Rogue said, her shoulders slumped, "Just shut up, okay?"

"You expect me to just-" Charles began, but the look in her eyes stopped him. Dead. He searched, desperately trying to penetrate the thick shield of turmoil, some sign of life, some semblance of hope.

He then understood the danger they were in. He pushed the ground, trying to stand, but he couldn't. His legs weren't responding. The psychic compensation for his nervous system's shortcoming was being blocked, he knew. He glanced at Carol, silently and passively floating there, holding Scott's life in her hands... Charles' eyes widened when he realized what purpose they were there to serve, and his train of thoughts rushed on forward, dragging his mind with him.

* * *

The elevator doors hissed open and Emma Frost let go of the code-breaker hooked up to the elevator's console. It hung from the wires, forgotten, as she stepped out, her mind reaching out to scan the floor for any signs of life. The headache, sharp as a blade, entered her skull and made her wince. She stumbled, put one hand on the wall and kept standing. The sensation itself was maddening, the distinctive impression that something was utterly wrong on this floor.

She tried to concentrate. One by one, she found the flat, analytical minds of the S.H.I.E.L.D. technicians, all big balls of rationality, woven from yarns of cold calculation and a dedication to mathematical precision. They were easily shut down, unconsciousness draped over their calculations easily. Equals zero. Zero. Zero.

She huffed in frustration. The more steps she took forward, the worse the headache would get, she knew.

* * *

Cassandra Nova was speaking as Carol cradled Scott's head in her hands, his body hanging obscenely from her grip.

"The Hellfire Club tried to extract me from his mind years ago. You know this. The reason is very simple: they knew a war was coming, just like that damned demagogue with a Holocaust chip on his shoulder did. Mutantkind needs a definitive leader. Someone with extraordinary blessings who would not capitulate to lesser beings – someone who wouldn't seek to make peace with the natives, but someone who could conquer."

"And that's you?" Rogue asked with a tired sigh.

"They have technology, but what is technology to a technopath? They can have the most diabolical battle plans in place, and all it would take is a single telepath to make it useless. When it comes down to it, we are better weapons _ourselves_ , without the need of external aid, and we can, and so will, triumph."

"Save the speech." Rogue shrugged, remembering the falling smile, "Where do Ah come in?"

"Oh. You absorb me, like you have absorbed the others, only this time, I will leave my brother's body completely, strictly speaking. I will leave no trace in his mind whatsoever."

"And me?" Rogue asked with a weary sigh. Charles got the distinct impression that she didn't much care about the answer.

 _But you'll love me in the end._

"You can stay in the hotel. You can make it bigger. You can have the rest of them there, or just be by yourself. I will preserve your mindscape, as it is, but I will only add to it as I see fit." Cassandra said with a smile, "I will be in total control. You will no longer have any say over what this body does or what I use it for."

Charles' heart was pounding in his temples. There were beads of sweat on his forehead from trying to breach through, but Cassandra had turned his power into a liability. He glanced at Carol, whom, silently, was holding Scott – a background decoration, an idle marionette, nothing more.

"If ya let him go." Rogue said, softly.

"Let who go?"

Rogue forced herself to look at him. His handsome face. His ruffled hair. His sweet cheeks, cradled in the hands of Ms. Marvel. His peaceful expression. His eyes, closed, that kept the sun inside them.

 _But you'll love me in the end._

"Rogue, you can't be seriously considering this!" Charles snapped, trying instead to use some oratory skill, "Do you really think her intentions are that pure? Don't you remember what she did to us, before we came here?"

 _How could I have ever loved you? You never loved me. You never knew what love was... until him._

"She was inside me all along, do you think she sat idly by as I went about my day? Think about it – that first night when you first had the urge to go down: why? Why would something pull you there?"

"Come on, Rogue," Cassandra Nova said, a hint of strain in her voice, "I'll spare whoever it is you want me to spare. You have my guarantee."

 _He gave everything so that you I could be here._

"How did you even know my password?" Charled asked, "Answer me that – how did you know my password? How did you know to access the archives? Do you think me so poor a housekeeper that I would just leave it out in the open for everyone to find? Do you really think the idea came from you?"

"That's just about enough from you, brother dear!" Cassandra Nova gestured towards him, and Rogue saw his lips fuse together, into a solid lump of flesh, "You're just adding unnecessary information."

 _I don't owe you anything, not after the way you treated me. Not after making me what I am, day after day, giving in and giving up and never giving up. But I'll love you in the end, and this isn't the end. Not just yet. I can't. But not him. I owe this to him._

"No." Rogue said, looking, for the first time, directly into the malevolent glint in Cassandra Nova's eyes, "Ah refuse."

A muscle twitched on the psionic tyrant's face.

"Fine. I'll make the choice simpler." Cassandra Nova said, "Refuse me, and-"

"Ah refuse. Ah didn't come this far just ta bow ta the likes of you. You're gonna gimme him, right now."

"I see that you've made up your mind. As you wish. Ms. Marvel, if you please... _break his neck, here and on the outside._ "

A scream reverberated in Carol's throat, unable to escape her clenched teeth. She strained against it, summoning up all her will not to move. For a moment, Rogue's vision flickered, and she caught a glimpse of the monochrome settings of the Danger Room, with Carol hovering in the air, screaming with Scott's head in her hands. A flash and it was gone.

 _No..._

Before Rogue could get a grip on the situation, Carol's hands moved and the sound of his neck snapping echoed in the night, louder than any of them could have imagined, and her hands released him. His limp body fell, disappearing into the darkness below, and there was a sudden silence.

* * *

Emma Frost back-handed Jean as if swatting a fly, the diamond-hard skin cutting open her cheek and dislodging two teeth as she swerved, limbs flailing, and fell against a wall, the world spinning in a daze. Nick Fury pulled out his .45 and unloaded on her without a moment's hesitation. Emma smiled. To his credit, he was landing every shot on precisely the same spot on her forehead, but twelve armor-piercing hyper-kinetic rounds could only scratch the surface and make minor, decimal shift on the scale of her headache.

"Stop right fucking there!" Fury warned, reloading, "I have explosive-tipped rounds in there, I don't wanna make you get another nose-job!"

"S.H.I.E.L.D. does do its homework." Emma Frost said, continuing to advance, "But, just between you and me, there is nothing between me and that console."

Fury fired. The round blew up in Emma Frost's eye, but failed to make an impression on the diamond surface. Emma started clapping as the next two bullets, aimed for her eyes, blew up in her face. Fury desperately pulled, pulled and pulled, and kept count in his head. He had twelve rounds, and ten... eleven...

A hand encrusted in diamonds slammed against his left temple and knocked Fury off his feet. He crashed against the console and his hand opened. The gun flew away, useless, with only one round left, and clattered away. Fury slumped against the console.

Emma Frost stood before the pitch-black. She had to admit that it was disturbing, yes, but not as disturbing as she thought it would. Barely out of sync, but to the others, it might as well not have existed at all.

She bent down, adjusting the camera feeds to see if she could take a peek.

She didn't feel the prick of the adamantium needle until it was buried deep into her main vein and Jean's thumb as pushing the plunger down.

* * *

The shock came first. The absolute silence of the aftermath, riddled with the sudden and overbearing return of awareness. Without echoes, without the self on the other side of the mirror, without anyone else in her head, Rogue felt the impact wash over her. She felt her heart, as if she had felt it for the first time, pounding in her chest. Her eyes darted up and found Ms. Marvel, hovering there, her hands clean. Her hands fucking clean.

Not a drop of blood, not a wound, not a scratch, just the sound of his beautiful, wonderful, fucked up head dislodging from its rightful place... to join the others in there, who couldn't be themselves, or be her. It all came crashing down and the sound of his body hitting the asphalt, far and wee, almost an afterthought, drowned out every other sound, ambient or otherwise, leaving only wretched silence that marked the breaking point of her fever.

 _But you'll love me in the end._

Hatred.

 _You..._

In the darkness of everything else, a star going supernova: white-hot particles, the building blocks of breath itself, crashing over her in a tide, washing away everything else. Like writing in the sand, surrendered to the wrath of a wave.

Pure hatred, unfiltered, bred from the most malevolent of thoughts, the most violent of notions, cutting to the bone and then into the veins. Virile hatred, potent hatred. Blessed hatred, sacred hatred, exalted in tongues of wrath, in the clenched fist shedding the fragile skin to reveal diamonds forming the cracking knuckles. Beautiful hatred, surging through her entire being, flowing in her veins and being reproduced, sent out fresh every time her heart beat – her pulse the BPM of a star forged of unrestrained, unconstrained, boundless _fucking hatred._

The echoes in their houses, for each soul a home, screaming out of opened windows, screaming where they stand and sit and lie, their throats vibrating with the wordless, mindless, brainless drive forward – screaming for vengeance, for vindication, for blood. Unsatisfied, thirsty for the blood of the taker, _the blood of the thief!_

Charles squeezed his eyes shut and cupped his hands over his ears. The cacophony was deafening, and he could feel the emotion rushing through him, like an intravenous drug, like heroin, like the morphine distillate he made, filling him up.

Rogue vanished with a resounding _BAMF!_ , and before Carol could even begin to clench her fists, a hand made of diamonds detonated on her face, knocking her off balance.

A flash, and Carol saw that the hand had disintegrated, but it was regenerating rapidly.

A flash, and she didn't see the eight Rogue duplicates that had emerged from her the moment of the blast. Fruits of self-harm, all the selves that Rogue had seen, all the despicable visages she had glimpsed in mirrors, and there they were, each one a fraction of all the violence that she was. They brandished their weapons: psychic swords, claws coated in organic metal, optic blasts so potent they could rival the sun... without a word, they closed in.

Before Carol could put her guard up, a sensation overwhelmed her. Entirely alien, this supreme distraction was the feeling she recalled from Cassandra Nova's operating table: pain.

Pain was everywhere. She couldn't even see the attack coming, let alone where it was coming from and what it was. Energies mixed on her unbreakable skin, taxing it to breaking point; fists pounded on every inch of her body, growing more pronounced by the blow; a sound drilled into her head, a sound that kept repeating, sustaining a note filled to the brim with malice forever...

...Rogue was screaming.

* * *

Charles managed to find a speck of light in the middle of the chaos, a pin-head gleam in the darkness, and immediately pounced on it. His psychic might, thinned to a single dot, shot forward like a bullet, and for a few moments, he managed to open his eyes in the real world.

Movement alerted him, and he saw Rogue, shuffling her feet, eyes closed... staggering towards the limp, unconscious body of Ms. Marvel.

* * *

The Blob rose, proud of his handiwork, and Avalanche opened up a route for Sebastian Shaw to fall through, widening a gap underground that left enough on top for the Blob to stand on. Shaw clawed at the air, fingers finding no purchase as he fell, the energy building up from the free fall useless in the face of the seemingly endless depths of yawning earth underneath.

Selene caught Wanda squarely in the face, and the ring on her forefinger cut open her lip. Wanda's rage boiled in her head, and she responded with a spinning kick that the psychic vampire leaped back to avoid...

Wolverine's punch landed on the back of her head, and she was unconscious before she could land back on her feet. Her body folded as it fell, and Wanda looked daggers at Wolverine, who, holding his mostly-healed side, breathed through clenched teeth.

"Hey!" Wanda said, "She was mine!"

"Yeah, yeah, and I wanted a classic Harley. We ain't gonna get all we want."

"I beg to differ!"

Harry slammed into Wolverine like a MAC truck, his mass, 200 times its usual at the point of impact, bent his spine like a cheap piece of wiring and threw him on the ground. He stopped, and took a deep breath. The X-Men and Brotherhood members around him braced themselves.

 _And they expect a physical assault. Fools._

"Let's see if I can't create a fault line here in New York."

* * *

A moment, and the relentless assault receded as Rogue recalled the clones. Carol blinked, trying to reorient herself, suspended in the air and fumbling for directions.

A blast of pure energy dug into her gut and Carol's fingers reached for the beam, trying to grasp the light. Through the blinding corona of the optic blast, she saw Rogue, angel wings sprouting from her back, closing in, pulling along steel beams from the houses around her, all sharpened into spears, all burning while freezing.

Storm clouds circled overhead as winds beat the mental projections of brick buildings, making the echoes, as out for blood as they were, tremble where they stood.

A thud was heard, faint. A sound so in the distance, so forgotten now, and Carol understood as Rogue's optic blast broke her skin and drew her blood in a gush of blue, what she had done.

Bone claws came out and they were coated immediately in organic metal. Carol barely put her guard up when Rogue's claws dug into the wound in her stomach, and white-hot pain enveloped her entire body.

"So you can bleed, can ya?" Rogue spat, pushing further to get deeper into the wound, to reach in and pull her guts out, "Ya best believe ya gonna bleed for this, _do ya fuckin hear me? Ya gonna fuckin die for this!"_

Carol tried to throw the ghost of a punch as Rogue's fingers found the wound. Rogue headbutted her, and in the slow-motion approach of her forehead, Carol caught a glimpse of her eyes.

Sadness. Boundless sorrow in the eyes of her killer, buried beneath the thin mask of rage. Like she had just lost something precious beyond any expression could quite capture, something that she could never replace and knew that she never could bring back, even if she killed her. The boy, lying motionless below had been everything to her... and now he had been taken away.

Carol felt brick-and-mortar smash against her back, pulverized on impact as Rogue flew forward, pushing past terminal velocity, dragging Carol down. Carol caught the breath she had been trying to, clenched her fist and with a desperate force that shattered the windows around them, punched Rogue in the head. Again. Again. Again. Carol felt bone break, saw Rogue spit out teeth by the dozen, but no matter how hard she hit, her strength amplified by the agony of Rogue's spiked, diamond fingers entering into her body, she could not get her to stop. Greedy fingertips grazed her internal organs, making her scream out.

" _Stop!_ " she screamed as they went through the layers of another building, "Please, Rogue, lis..."

Rogue withdrew her hands and delivered a sturdy kick to the wound, sending Carol flying through the air, carried by her own momentum, and deep into the street. The asphalt cracked, the road shifted as Carol's body was shoved into it, digging her deeper and deeper in until finally, mercifully, she stopped.

* * *

Wanda clenched her teeth. Around her, everyone was sinking into the soft soil, the ground buckling under their bodies. She saw Avalanche, the fucko, trying to respond by keeping himself on the ground, but he was still sinking, quickly and surely.

Wanda felt the ground pass her waist. How was he doing it? That fat fuck – what was his power?

"Oh, please don't struggle!" Wanda caught a hint of strain in his laughter, "There's no use! Maybe you did away with my compatriots, but I am not so easy... despite how I look."

"Ya look like a fuckin' fat fuckin' _fuck_!" Wanda spat, sliding in deeper, "A fucking ginger fucking fat fucking fuck at that, too!"

"Well, I do like my food like I like my enemies – easy to swallow and all the more delicious for it."

"Oh, fuck you!"

Wanda lifted her hand and concentrated. She shifted the pressure differential around Harry, lifting him up his feet and three feet into the air. A second later, he fell like a stone and stood up.

 _So that's how you're doing it._

"Wandawandawanda, Ican't-" Quicksilver's panicked voice came as he struggled, moving as fast as he could, but unable to make any progress.

"Shut up, Pietro! I figured it out, so shut the fuck up!"

"Oh, no you don't!" Harry shouted, "You witch!"

Wanda glanced around. Apart from herself and Quicksilver, there was nobody left on the surface level, and she was up to her armpits in the dirt.

She clenched her teeth. This was basic. So basic that she wouldn't...

In the distance, she felt the maddening splinter of the out-of-sync reality shift, and shift back into sync with base reality. She breathed a sigh of relief before it shifted again and out of sync.

* * *

Carol curled up in a ball, hands pressing against the wound. Pain was all she saw. Pain was all she could feel. Her nerves were on fire, she was bleeding profusely in a hole in the ground and she wished for a moment to be on Cassandra Nova's operating table, open belly to throat but unable to feel a thing.

"Rogue, stop it! You don't know what you're doing!" Carol heard Charles call. She heard Rogue land right on top of her, feet planted on either side of her, fists clenched, eyes ablaze with hatred.

"Rogue..." Carol hissed through clenched teeth, "Please..."

Rogue didn't say anything. She simply reached and removed one of her gloves.

"Stop it, Anna Marie!" Charles shouted. The mindscape flickered again and he caught the sight of Rogue standing over Carol, removing her glove. Carol heard Cassandra Nova cackling in the distance, her amusement coming through loud and clear, bouncing in the air.

"Please... stop..." she begged.

Carol lifted a shaking hand, trying to shield herself. Rogue slapped it away as she went down on one knee.

"Shoulda thoughta that before ya snapped his _fucking_ neck, you bitch!"

Rogue's bare hand reached down and pressed down on Carol's face, fingers locking in. She put her knee on her chest as Carol weakly struggled, arms flailing, gripping her arm, trying to get her to budge, to let go...

"Rogue, stop!" Charles screamed in desperation, "Stop! Anna Marie!"

"No!" Rogue snapped, feeling the surge rushing through her, raw energy coursing through her veins, "No, Charles! No! Anna Marie doesn't exist! That is not who Ah am!"

"And who are you, then?" Cassandra Nova asked, giggling like a little girl, "Who are you supposed to be?"

 _But you'll love me in the end. Please... love me._

"Ah'm the thief! Ah'm the taker! _Ah am the Rogue!_ "

* * *

Pure, exhilarating, intoxicating... the flow of memories, encoded information in every gene, suppressed but present, flowing in with everything else. Every impulse, every thought, dream and struggle, every piece of encryption flowing into her through skin contact, giving her goosebumps.

Somewhere, in the background, Rogue could hear Carol screaming.

 _Good. Let her scream. Let her fucking scream._

"No!"

Rogue felt Charles' mind reach into hers, a shadow draping itself over her thoughts, a hand reaching to halt her. Rogue's telepathic response was so potent that she heard Charles howling in pain, reminding him that she also had access to Jean's powers.

Carol squirmed, hands trying to pull off Rogue's fingers, but she was holding on strong, draining every last drop of life from her.

" _Rogue, stop!"_

His voice. In her head. All around her. Inside her. Now, forever inside her, where he would remain, the echo that despises her, the echo that she can touch and taste.

"How does it feel, Ms. Marvel!?" Rogue hissed through clenched teeth, venom in her voice, "How does it fuckin feel!?"

" _Rogue, please! You're gonna kill her!"_

Cassandra's laughter, mad, bouncing off the walls.

Ghost hands on her shoulders, trying to pull her off. Hands of his ghost.

" _Rogue! Rogue!"_

 _Say it. Say my name. Say it and hope it'll save you, you fucking..._

" _Rogue! Rogue, please! Snap out of it!"_

Carol's struggling was dying down. Her limbs were growing limp as Rogue's hand drained the last of life from her, filling her palm with pins and needles, suffusing her entire being with an echo.

Somewhere in the city, an impenetrable prison was emerging from the ground, forming brick by brick to forever shut in the one echo that would never be heard. Ever.

" _Stop! Please, stop!"_

Rogue's ears perked. It didn't sound like Carol's voice. No, it wasn't a woman's voice at all.

" _Get off of her! Rogue! Come on!"_

 _Don't you get it..? There is no helping anyone. Everything is done. She'll be gone soon and I... I'm still..._

" _Rogue, can you hear me? Rogue? Rogue! Listen to my voice!"_

 _I'm still here and I'm still..._

The insane smile, falling, the assurance that she would be loved.

"You're killing her!"

Arms outstretched, as if to welcome her own killer, the reflection in the mirror...

She recognized the voice. His.

 _Everybody dies, Scott. You died. I died. I watched myself die and it's alright. It's all alright, in the end._

"Stop!"

His desperate scream as Carol twitched, and her hands, trying until then desperately to get Rogue off, slowly slid down the slick fabric of her skin-tight uniform and fell.

"Oh, _God_..."

The last vestiges of Carol Danvers' life, coursing through Rogue's veins, sealed the prison cell of the echo, buried under layer under layer under layer of conscious and unconscious rejection of its existence, stopped the moment her eyes opened and the familiar, neutral settings of the Danger Room came into focus... and with it, the concerned suns in Scott's eyes, staring at her through his visor, two bright red dots glowing in the center of her thoughts.


	11. She and Her Darkness

" _ **Untouchable"**_

 **Chapter Ten  
"She and Her Darkness"**

 **(Why is your violence still hurting me?)**

Before Jean's eyes, the veil of darkness covering the Danger Room flickered, like a screen trying to adjust itself, and gave her a snapshot that lasted a fraction of a second. Knowing that without her ability she wouldn't be able to go back to the memory itself, she resolved to keep Emma Frost in check. The dose had knocked her out, which she had expected, but she didn't know how long for. With Nick Fury still out of commission and her abilities under wraps, she could only wait, and hope that nobody else would come down the hallway.

The gun in her hand, still only the bullet in the chamber, was heavy, but it was trained directly at Emma Frost's head, the barrel tip pressing against her skin. Jean stared at the monitor showing the security feed. All she could see was the unconscious form of storm. The coms were dead. Nobody had answered her hails. She knew that the S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel were out of commission as well, as none of them had responded to the gunshots.

Emma Frost stirred.

The void blinked once more. Again. It started to flicker, as if someone was pounding on the light switch. There. Gone. There. Gone.

 _What's going on in there?_

* * *

"Well," Cassandra Nova said, leaning over the roof railing, "that certainly puts one of my primary contingencies to bed."

"What did you even intend to do with her?" Charles snarled, "Another pawn? A bodyguard?"

"Try the building blocks of solidarity, if your excessively generous methods were to be somewhat more beneficial than my acceptably generous methods."

"You mean her nature?"

Cassandra Nova raised an eyebrow.

"You knew?"

"Of course I knew that she wasn't human or mutant." Charles said, leaning back and clasping his hands together on his lap, "From my first scan of her mind on. There was a certain... patina to it, if you will, that was of the neither kind. No distinctive DNA/RNA feedback that would result from an X-Gene, well, not a conventional one at any rate."

"She has that, yes, and I concede that it _is_ a giveaway."

"Which still does not explain what you intended to do with her. Solidarity for what?"

"Not for, but _against_. An alien invasion, of course. What other use could I have for her?"

"But you did make one mistake." Charles said, his voice bitter.

"Which is?"

"We are still in the mindscape, are we not?"

"By-the-bye, I must say, the architecture is exquisite."

"Thank you. Flattery aside, do tell me, in accordance to my classification, what class of mutant is Rogue?"

"Lambda. Her various psychological traumas prevent her from being more."

Charles managed a strained smile.

"Correction: Lambda _to Omega_. Have you bothered to see what's going on outside of this projection? I must say, you'll find it... riveting."

Cassandra's brow creased into a centerpiece of wrinkles.

"You can use my eyes." Charles said.

Cassandra closed her eyes. She blinked and opened them and saw through Charles' actual eyes to see a room filled with the brilliant red light of Cyclops' optic blast. The wide, focused beam was flowing through his visor and dispersing mid-point to its target, flowing around an invisible shield...

...a shield projected by the outstretched, gloved hand of Rogue who was standing above a still (deathly still) Carol Danvers...

Charles' eyes widened to reflect Cassandra Nova's surprise when she noticed that Rogue's bare hand hand Ms. Marvel's face in a vice-grip.

"Oh." Cassandra Nova managed as she saw Cyclops reaching for his visor, to give Rogue the raw blast, "Oh my."

A second later and Cassandra Nova felt the real world disappear behind the facade of the mindscape, and fingers wrapped around her throat.

* * *

Harry Leland felt his feet leave the ground and those assembled, on their knees or buried deep into the ground, breathed a sigh of relief, or moaned in pain from broken bones. The red glow carried Harry Leland up, spinnning him around, and he didn't start flailing until he noticed that the Scarlet Witch was glowing, and that no matter what he did, he was just the equivalent of a helium balloon, rising to the night sky.

"Let me go!" he called out, his voice breaking. The oxygen around him was thinning, and he saw that Wanda was giving him the finger as he lost sight of them and shot upward.

* * *

Hatred in those eyes, such beautiful hatred. Hatred she could nourish, take the adrenaline and cortisol and create endorphines with it, rearrange the chemicals and make her blood -her own blood, not the Rogue's- burn with ecstasy. Manipulate every strand of DNA so that ancestral memory, ancient knowledge, would reveal itself like a scroll unfolding.

All this effort. Years of waiting in the back corners of her brother's awareness, using the slipstream of dreams to feed from common imagery, to grow stronger. Strong enough to reach out, to find one that could be her new home, her new skin. Go over them one by one, touching their secrets, caressing their disgustingly human psyches, the id, the ego, the superego – the same parable from the dawn of man, playing itself over and over again.

And then... her.

Her turmoil. The writhing, cancerous mass of stolen lives, of stolen happiness. Perpetual displeasure, perpetual ruminations.

A suicidal ideation that she, herself, found to be disgusting beyond all measure, and so, perfect. Perfect. But not right away, no. First, everything had to be stripped away. You couldn't make an omelette without breaking the entire stock of eggs, and so, first the Xavier Archives. Then the Academy. Then the diamond, glittering reach of Emma Frost and now... the eyes, glowing with precious hatred.

Rogue was staring right into Cassandra Nova's entire being.

"Ya think Ah forgot you? That what you think? Well, sugah, Ah said Ah wouldn't... ya fuckin parasite... So you'll leave Charles' mind, huh? Had enough of the all the shit he keeps in there? All the shit he keeps hidden?" her thumbs pressed down her windpipe, eliciting a choking sound from her, "Well, guess what, ya bitch, this is mah home. This is mah body. Ah get ta say what happens ta it, and you – you're done. You're over!"

Charles' eyes widened as Rogue began to glow a brilliant, phosphorous white.

* * *

Emma Frost stared down the barrel of the gun. This was a new sensation for her, not being able to use her telepathy. She couldn't tell if Jean Grey was bluffing when she said she would pull the trigger and get her right between the eyes. One shot, one bullet and it'd all be over.

Her resolve was still holding fast, but in the face of how they had managed to counter their every effort so far, there was very little point in resisting.

Besides, the answer she was asking for wouldn't make a difference. It was already too late. Emma Frost knew that as Jean Grey placed her finger on the trigger, there was a room full of suits and silver tie-clips and American flag lapel pins who were signing their names under their respective dotted lines, approving a policy that would shape the future and line the pockets of Bolivar Trask.

"Why?" Jean repeated the question, "Why do all this? What does the Hellfire Club gain from what happens here?"

"Because tomorrow, Nick Fury," Emma Frost cocked her head in his direction, "will write down that mutants do have factions that pose a significant national security risk. Once he does that, the sub-committee will take his words out of context and then we will _all_ be a security risk. The Hellfire Club just wanted a leader in place, even as a figurehead, who is not as much of an extremist as Magneto or as much as a brown-noser as Xavier. Cassandra Nova is a necessary compromise between the two."

"How is that supposed to work? Between Hitler and Ghandi is Stalin?"

"Not a bad analogy, but she is hardly Josef Stalin."

"The professor won't give her his body." Jean said, "You know that."

"He won't need to. The plan, all along was not to help Ms. Nova surface within Xavier. Yes, with his abilities, he could be a suitable host, but his ego would override hers and we would be left with nothing."

"Then, who?"

"There was only ever one candidate from the start." Emma Frost smiled, "And one wonders how easy it must be to get into the Academy of Tomorrow..."

Something clicked in Jean's head.

"Rogue."

"Yes." Emma Frost grinned, her eyes darting towards the barrel of the gun, "It'd be a kindness, if anything. Have you seen the inside of her mind? The chaos, barely contained by Charles Xavier's artificial construct... they'll figure it out, you know. The echoes. They'll get tired of her, and they'll swallow her whole. All that we want is to get someone capable of helping mutantkind out of what's coming. We-"

Without waiting for another word, Jean pistol-whipped Emma Frost. She crashed her head against the console and slumped, just as Nick Fury began to stir.

A headache, sharp as a blade, entered Jean's skull and split it open with pure agony. Her nervous system flared up, burning bright, and she heard her own scream, animalistic and in agony, as if it was a distant echo, far and wee, fading out with the rest of her consciousness.

* * *

Cassandra Nova screamed as Rogue tore into her, white-hot tendrils reaching in, and Charles joined the choir when he felt her turn his own ability against him. Her reach scraped into his skull and dove deep into his mind, rabid focus scanning every memory, thought, impulse and reflex for the essence of what should not have been, the only thing that didn't belong in a sea of self – the Other.

Cassandra Nova grabbed hold of Rogue's wrists, but she wouldn't relent. Her mind rebelled, tried to push Rogue off, but she and her darkness pushed back, hard. At the same time, Rogue's mind pierced Charles' and burned every instance, every single iteration of the name, the shape, the very essence of the very idea of Cassandra Nova from him, tearing apart his psyche by pulling the tangled thread of her existence from him.

"Stop..." Cassandra Nova choked, _"Please..."_

She tried to reach out, to fight back, but the flicker of her defense was extinguished instantly by the storm of Rogue's rage.

"Look at what you did, _look at what you made me do!"_

 _It'll be like you never happened. I promise. I promise._

Charles collapsed. The last thing he saw was Cassandra Nova, now her own entity and only that, squirming in Rogue's grip, glowing bright, a star going supernova, disintegrating and dispersing the fading, burning shards of a self existing only as the bare form of a psyche. Breaking her mind, and it all grew more and more distant – another life, another mind, another place and as Rogue screamed at the top of her lungs, the sound following Chares down the fall towards unconsciousness, he felt as if he had lost someone important – as if he had just woken up from a dream where the one he had loved, should have loved, had died in his arms.

When Charles opened his eyes again, he faced the gridded ceiling and the steady beeping of the heart monitor.

* * *

Jean groaned and stretched as Charles shifted where he laid. He noticed that she had been holding onto his hand. He squeezed, gently, and Jean immediately snapped to. Stray strands of frizzed, red hair framed her tired face as her eyes, filled with worry, focused onto him. The thought of him, the bare idea, almost screamed out in her mind, entering his, before she even said anything.

"Hello, Professor."

"Hello, Jean."

"You're awake."

"How long?"

"Five days. I was starting to fear you would never come out of it."

"How did we do?"

Jean's face dropped. Disappointment, fear, anxiety emanated from her in waves and Charles caught stray thoughts that made no sense.

"Jean."

"It can wait." She said.

"Tell me."

Jean sighed and leaned back in her chair. Her head fell back and she stared at the ceiling.

"Ms. Marvel is gone." She said, her voice tired and bitter, "Rogue drained her. Completely."

"Is she..?"

"No. She's still breathing. But her brain is dead. There is no-one home, Charles. Nobody in her mind. It's nothing but white noise."

"Where's Rogue..?"

"Still unconscious. I want to think she will wake up as herself, and then I want to believe that she will wake up thinking she is Carol Danvers and I will never have to look her in the eye again."

Her anger was clear, in her voice and in her clenched fist.

"Anyway." Jean said, unclenching her fingers, "S.H.I.E.L.D. took the Hellfire Club in... well, okay, Harry Leland and Emma Frost. The other two managed to escape. They told me that Sebastian Shaw dug a tunnel underneath the Hudson, all the way to New Jersey, just to get away... with his bare hands, too."

"They were here?"

"We held the line out front. Only Emma Frost managed to get past us, and I took care of her... after a fashion."

Charles couldn't help but smile.

"Don't." Jean said, and when she looked him in the eye, he saw nothing but sorrow, "She committed murder, Charles. She killed Ms. Marvel. I don't know what we're going to do with her, but she can't stay. I'm sorry, but she can't."

"I can't cast her out like a leper."

"You can't keep her here. Cassandra Nova aside, she killed her."

"What aside?"

Jean raised an eyebrow. Charles repeated the question:

"What is a Cassandra Nova?"

* * *

On the roof of the hotel, Rogue stood, her coat (his gift) billowing in the breeze, contemplating the cityscape and the things it represented. She could see, although she couldn't, the city limits from where she stood, and the message, loud and clear:

 **THERE IS NOTHING OUT THERE FOR YOU.**

But that wasn't the question. She had already known that, all along.

 _In the end, who am I?_

 _I am not the echoes. The echoes are not me. They are the others. The others I stole from, the others I took precious moments of happiness from. I tried to live their lives and hope that one day, I could let the things they took for granted eclipse me, forever._

 _But who am I?_

 _I am not Anna Marie. Anna Marie was just an idea, just the idea of an idea. A name for something I haven't ever known. Was I her under all the punishments, all the adult games of Caldecott, all the conditioning and stray memories, everything that made me who I am?_

 _Was I her, once?_

 _If I was, I don't think I can go back to her. She's dead now, dead and gone, and I don't know who she was, or who she was supposed to be._

 _I just... I just wanted to be someone... no. I just always wanted to be someone_ else _. Someone who could belong. Someone who wasn't unwanted. Someone worthy of being loved. Someone cherished. Somebody else's someone._

 _I never realized that I was me. Myself. The Rogue or somebody else, whoever I am and whatever I am to be called, I was always just me, and I never understood why that always felt so wrong._

 _Maybe it's the X-Gene. Maybe it's just me, or maybe it's the fact that I killed her in a moment of blind rage._

 _Maybe it's just that I finally killed you, and..._

 _And I think..._

 _Yes, that's it._

 _I love you. I love you, in the end._

 _I love you, because now you're gone and I will never know what it's like to be you._


	12. Epilogue (Element 5: Resignation)

" _ **Untouchable"**_

 **Epilogue**

 **(Element 5: Resignation)**

 **(** **Ich wollte meinen Frieden mit der Welt, aber die Welt wollte meinen Frieden nicht.** **)**

She glided gracefully in the air, moving through the open space with ease. She executed an Immelman turn, and hated the way her body knew how to do it... loathed that her mind knew what it even was. Between the loops and the pivot and the feeling of thin air holding her up, there was the nagging awareness of how this wasn't who she was now, but this was who she had always been. For Rogue, the conclusion was inevitable: Anna Marie was a fool, and the Rogue was worse than anyone had ever thought.

She came to a stop in mid-air and curled up in a ball, arms around her knees, hovering. Without the ground underneath her, it felt like being suspended from nonexistent strings, and if she so wished, she could float down, or up, or in any direction, even as she tried to keep her thoughts from overwhelming her.

The nagging awareness prodded her and Rogue spread out her limbs, trying to shake loose its maddening presence. There was a prison cell in the city, she knew. A concrete box with layers and layers of security between its sole occupant and the city itself. A gift from Charles, to remind herself of her own monstrous nature.

Somewhere in the Mansion, out in the real world, Carol Danvers was hooked to life support, breathing through tubes. A shell, emptied out by her in a moment of anger. All because...

No. Going there wasn't going to do her any good. She had avoided going there by avoiding him, like how she avoided all of them and locked herself in the Danger Room to fly until she felt like she had forgotten to walk. She had convinced herself at first that she was just going to get a better handle on the gifts that were hers now. This had been revealed a lie as soon as she had begun – she hadn't just stolen the flight, the invincibility, the super strength... but she had stolen a lifetime spent with them as well.

 _No. That's not it._

 _I stole a lifetime. All of it. The memories are gone, but whatever was stronger than them are still here, still with me._

 _A part of me, now. Like Anna Marie._

The other parts of her, the ones still untouched and undiscovered felt sick to her, as if stricken with a malady of her own making. She thought that she could believe she could keep herself away from herself, but knew that she had to drag the remains of herself everywhere she went... even into the air.

But there was something liberating about flying, something that brought a smile to her face, even when she knew she shouldn't smile at all. It was as if her burdens had been on the ground, and when she took off, she left them behind. She wondered, again and again if Warren felt the same way every time he spread his wings, if he felt free and alive...

"You've got the hang of it."

Rogue dropped like a stone. She stopped herself mere inches above the ground, and then landed with a move that Scott found to be beyond graceful.

Scott smiled. Rogue hid.

She didn't know what to say to him, and all the things that popped up in her head seemed to be too desperate.

 _You died for me,_ she wanted to say, _you died because of me. I know it was a dream, but you died just the same and I don't know what I can do to make it hurt less than it does._

"She knows it." She said, instead, "So Ah know it."

"Is she there, in your head?"

Rogue shook her head.

"Muscle memory." She said, "Everythin that she was, Ah am now."

"You're still Anna Marie to me."

A sharp pain entered her chest. Rogue dreaded what she knew was coming.

 _Please don't._

Time was, she would've given anything to hear the words, but now that she knew they were coming, all she could do was look for ways out. An exit, a thought, a motion that could prevent him from opening his mouth, prevent him from getting close and embracing her like he was doing now, anything but that small kiss on the top of her head –the colors of grey-, to keep him away from the murderer, to keep him from-

"I love you." He said, "I just want you to know that. You know everyone is talking."

She did, of course. She had seen the glares, the quick exits, the panicked shows of mock respect, all repeating a single word: killer. Killer.

"I want you to know," he said, "I stand with you."

Rogue clenched her teeth. The emotional whirlwind inside her was about to wreck the town, she knew, but there was no way of containing any of it, no way of stopping herself from saying...

"Don't."

Scott went all stiff. He withdrew, and Rogue could finally look into those ruby red glasses.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" she blurted out, "What? How can ya love somethin so broken, Scott? How do ya come back, knowing what Ah am, knowing what Ah did, and then just tell me you love me? How do the words come outta your mouth!? How!?"

Scott couldn't move, or speak, or think.

"Ah hate myself every single second for ever lovin you, for ever carin about you at all, 'cause you remind me of things Ah'll never have... things Ah'll never be, and... that Ah'll wanna be those things you wanna believe Ah _am,_ but that ain't me! How can ya not see that? Jesus fuckin Christ, Ah killed her! Ya heard that? Lemme spell it out for ya: _Ah. Fuckin. Killed. Her!_ " her scream echoed in the Danger Room, "Ya know what else? What's worse? Ah fuckin _loved_ doing it! She ain't gonna recover, ya know, she's just gonna rot in that bed, and Ah did that, and-and what? Ya love me? How fuckin sick in the head are ya? How fucked up do ya gotta be to love a piece of fuckin shit like me? And ya know what, Scott? Ah know that you do! Ah know that if Ah had said nothin, did nothin, you'd carry on like Ah wasn't the _monster_ that Ah am – because you just love me that much. Enough to accept me. Enough to take me for who Ah am – not who Ah can be, not for fuckin Anna fuckin Marie. Anna Marie is a church girl who puts on her Sunday's best and makes nice with the congregation, Scott. Nobody fuckin knows who she is, not really. Everybody assumes she's somebody, well, Ah can tell ya this for free – she ain't nobody, do ya hear me? Ah'm nobody! Ah'm the Rogue!"

The bitter taste on her tongue, the truth.

"Ah'm the Rogue and Ah kill. And what do ya do with all this? Ya stand there, like you're standin there now, tellin me that ya love me, because you have that in you, that sick fuckin feelin that if the whole world was against me, you'd stand with me, because ya always knew that Ah was fucked up, and ya accepted it, because you're just as fucked up as Ah am! And ya like it, Scott, ya like the thought that there is someone on God's green earth that's as fucked up and neurotic as you fucking are!"

 _You make me feel like I can be beautiful, like I can do anything I want, like I am worth it, like I am good... like I am given the world..._

"And you know what, Scott..?" Rogue took a deep breath, " _Ah fuckin hate you for it."_

Rogue took off and flew past him and out the doors.

* * *

The night, damp and chilly, was waiting outside. The open sky, the roads that she had once traveled on the ground, were waiting. Maybe she'd catch a flight, sit on the wing and let the plane carry her. Joyride a fucking Boeing.

The bag was ready. All the essentials. Nothing more than what she needed. She had done this once before, or rather, he had done it for her. This time, it was different. Everything was. For once, she was glad that Kitty left a window open. She glided out, her duffel bag hanging low, and flew in a straight line. She was past the Mansion gates when she heard his gruff, throaty voice.

"Hey, Stripe. Was waitin' for ya."

Rogue looked down and saw Logan, leaning against the gate, smoking a cigar. She spotted a six pack of beer, five empty bottles, the last one in his hand. She gracefully glided down and stood in front of him.

"Heard what happened with Slim."

"Who from?"

"This place ain't so tight-lipped, ya know?"

Rogue couldn't help but smile. The gossip mill.

"Ah know."

"Where you're goin', few ever go. Ones that go, wish they never had. But I'm here to tell ya - ya don't gotta take off again."

Rogue felt tears sting her eyes.

"Why not, Logan?" she asked, her voice quivering, "Ah don't belong here."

"Neither do I, but you don't see me leavin' fer good, now, do ya?"

"It's different."

"Is it? Oh, I _know_ , Stripe. I know."

"Ah don't know who Anna Marie is or was. Ah don't know who Ah am now, either. Ah can't figure it out here... or with him. Ah can't bear it." The tears kept streaming down, "Ah can't bear that he can still just..."

"It's hard, at first." Logan said, "Fuck knows, I know what it feels like. To have people look at you and say they care, even after they know everything you've done. Even after you show yourself to be the monster that y'are, they still tell you that they care. And you think to yourself, Jesus, somethin' must be wrong with them if they can do that. Nobody in their right mind would wanna get close to me."

Rogue wiped her tears on her sleeve and glared at him.

"Yeah. I've seen stuff. Did stuff. That back there's small potatoes compared to what I did. And I have them. Sure, they're scared shitless'a me, but Chuck, and few others, they... they understand. And that's enough, sometimes."

"But he doesn't." Rogue said, "That's the whole point. He thinks he does, but doesn't. He can't, and Ah ain't gonna let him neither. Look, Ah'm with you if it comes to a fight, but otherwise, Ah'm gone. Maybe he can live with it. Maybe you think it ain't no big deal-"

"It is _the_ biggest deal." Logan drained the last of his beer, "You took a life. It's gonna stay with ya for the rest of yer life, Stripe. I told you, I know. But sooner or later, you're gonna have to accept that what's done is done, and you crossed a line. It ain't always pretty on the other side, but it ain't always bad to have someone tell you that, whatever else, know what, you're alright."

Rogue reached out and pulled Logan into a hug. Logan, startled at first, returned the gesture, careful to avoid her cheek. Rogue withdrew after a few moments.

"Thanks. But he's..." no, no more tears, that was done, it was over, "Ah can't. At least, not now, not yet. Too soon. It's too new."

"Alright, then. I said my piece." Logan took a puff from his cigar, "Godspeed, Rogue."

"Thanks, though, for tryna stop me."

"I wasn't. I just wanted you to know that I understood."

Rogue lingered for a moment, a moment of fleeting doubt creeping in. But then, it vanished with one look at the Institute. It had been home for years now, but hadn't Caldecott? Hadn't Destiny's house? Hadn't other places?

She could find another home.

She took off, gliding though the air. She didn't look back. Her home was in her head, she knew, in the hotel's penthouse suite, where he was waiting for her. Where he would always be waiting for her to come... and she would always come, she knew, because it was now the only place in this world that she felt safe in.

The only place in this world where she was untouchable.


	13. Coda (Into X)

" _ **Untouchable"**_

 **Coda**

 **(Into X)**

 **(** **Mal ehrlich, habt ihr wirklich geglaubt, dass der Mensch die Krone der Schöpfung ist, das Ebenbild Gottes?)**

" _...Registration Act will be enforced with the utmost delicacy, and that it would not be by force that..."_

"Yes, and I've heard it said before."

Charles felt the cool night breeze caress his scalp. His sat up straighter and turned his wheelchair around to see Erik, his helmet tucked under his arm, standing in front of his desk. Charles straightened out his nightgown, but then reminded himself that Erik had seen him in much less polished positions.

"Have you?" he asked and clasped his hands together on his lap.

"Something similar. It meant the same thing then as it does now, Charles. You know that."

"Have you come to invite me to your war, Erik?"

Magneto pointed at the screen and the droning TV turned itself off.

"You mean the war that just started? No. I did not. There is a reason why my helmet isn't on my head, Charles. I want to talk. Honestly and openly."

Charles' brow creased. Erik leaned against his desk and set his helmet down.

"I don't want this." Erik said, "I've... seen this happen." Magneto felt Charles' touch in his mind, light as a feather, "I can do two things. I can either act like the men I have suffered in the hands of, or I can be on the other side of that line. I know that I am full capable of doing what they did to us, to them in turn. Lord knows I've _tried_. But I do not want to become a Nietzchean abyss. I don't want to act like a renegade eugenics zealot. I know that we, us and them, are different, fundamentally so, but I don't want this war on our heads."

"I agree. But there doesn't seem to be anything we can do to stop it."

"There is. Which is why I'm here. You know the old saying. Divided, we fall."

Charles' eyes widened.

"Are you here to propose an alliance, Erik? After all these years?"

"I've seen the footage of your X-Men and my fledglings stopping the Hellfire Club dead at their tracks." Erik said, crossing his arms, " _Fasces._ "

"I don't think an image that has come to represent fascism is in order."

"The underlying philosophy is. United, we are stronger. We've..." Erik hesitated, "...had our differences over the years, you and I. Maybe it's time we started looking at what we have in common, instead, and what we have in common, is an enemy."

"I don't think we will get anywhere so long as we think of them as the enemy." Charles said, "Our relationship is decidedly adversarial, but there is still hope for something a bit more amicable, in my opinion."

"Maybe. Maybe not. Time will tell and we will see. But for now, just answer me this: do you honestly believe that man is the crown of creation?"

"Perhaps not. But unless we view them as equals, or at the very least equivalents, despite our position as the step beyond them, we are bound to lose."

"Because then we're not diplomatic enough?"

"No. Because then we will have underestimated them."

Erik laughed. Charles smiled. How warm this felt to them both, how familiar and how right. As if it had been there for years, as if this was just another random moment in the history of their friendship.

"You know, it's funny." Erik said, "According to Emma Frost's testimony, this was what they were after in the first place. Unity. On their terms, of course, but unity still. In a way, they might have accomplished that."

"They wanted to take charge. To row. We merely want to steer and to ensure that we are safe."

"Well, then. I hope you have a few spare rooms for me and mine."

"We can always expand. We do have one regrettable vacancy, however."

"I've heard about Rogue."

"For all my bravado, I don't think I succeeded in helping her, Erik."

"We all have our demons that we have to conquer before we realize that we are the monsters, but we can be better. But it cannot be done for us, or on our behalf. You know that. And so, apropos..."

Erik stood up and walked over to Charles. He held out his hand.

"For the future." He said.

Charles could not recall a gentler look in his friend's eyes. He had seen his steely resolve and his nigh-insane fury, burning brightly behind them, but never this vulnerable, never this open.

Without a moment's hesitation, Charles took his hand and shook it, and said, in earnest:

"Welcome to the X-Men."

* * *

 _Author's Notes: ...and that's it, I think. I have had an idea to loosely link this series to Charles' premonitions in the final episode, as well as explore the naked expression of Rogue's issues with herself, and through her, why a "Scouge" made so much sense within the context of this series. So it's one stone, one story, but several things, chief among them giving Rogue the powers that she is known for. Even though my intention was to bring them together and keep them that way, some things, especially my general disdain for happy endings served neatly with cherry on top, dictated that something be done about that, but I never did anything here that I did not set up in a way that would naturally run its own course. If you have read so far, I congratulate you on your patience, and if you could drop me a line, I'd appreciate it._


End file.
